Lily and Jim is a 16mm animated short film by Don Hertzfeldt

Don Hertzfeldt

Don Hertzfeldt is the creator of many short animated films, including the Academy-Award nominated Rejected and Everything Will Be OK. His animated films have received over 150 awards and have been presented around the world. Before the age of thirty, his films were already the subject of several...

. It is Hertzfeldt's third student film from UC Santa Barbara, for which he single-handedly animated over 10,000 drawings. In the film, an awkward blind date between a hopeless couple goes from very bad to much worse. Voice actors Robert May (Jim) and Karin Anger (Lily) improvised a number of their dialogues.

The movie eventually received 25 film festival awards, including Grand Prizes from the New Orleans Film Festival

New Orleans Film Festival

The New Orleans Film Festival is an annual film festival organized by the nonprofit organization New Orleans Film Society, a film society founded in 1989. The festival has been held since the society's inception. The festival takes place in mid-October. The festival, nicknamed "Cannes on the...

 and the USA Film Festival

USA Film Festival

-History:Founded in 1971, the USA Film Festival has presented the world, national and regional premieres of thousands of studio and independent feature films and short experimental, animated, documentary and dramatic films....

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In 1998, it was shown on an episode of MTV's Cartoon Sushi

Cartoon Sushi

Cartoon Sushi was an animation showcase program that aired on MTV from 1997 to 1998. It was produced by Nick Litwinko. As a collection of animation shorts, Cartoon Sushi was a spiritual successor to MTV's Liquid Television...

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On DVD

In 2005, the original 16mm negative was digitally restored and remastered for the first time, for release on the extensive "Bitter Films Volume 1" DVD compilation of Hertzfeldt's 1995-2005 films. Special features created for Lily and Jim include Hertzfeldt's original production sketches and notes, as well as a 15 minute animatic consisting of humorous audio outtakes and unused improvisational dialogue from the original 1996-97 session tapes. The original voice actors were also reunited after 9 years to do a retrospective audio commentary.

The DVD is available exclusively at the Bitter Films website, http://www.bitterfilms.com