Analyzing Don Hertzfeldt's Billy's Balloon For Timing and Audience Expectations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jksRQcI9NA

Don Hertzfeldt has an interesting use of morbid humor in his work, creating a surprisingly dark animation (for the style it is drawn in) of sentient balloons beating up and murdering babies just out of the sight of authority. The style is simple, but the deeper underlying themes of abuse and invisible suffering can be felt throughout, especially as the audience watches the clearly miserable Billy kicked around until his implied death, along with several other children suffering the same fate by the end. The short accomplishes playing around with audience expectations by letting certain sequences play out for lengthy periods of time, such as from around 00:02:10 to 00:03:17. The balloon drops Billy over and over again for over a minute. Every time it cycles through dropping the child, it pauses mid-air to create more and more tension as the audience expects it to drop Billy every time, making every pause somehow feel longer and longer as the audience watches the child become more and more despondent with his hopeless situation as a result. Another good example of this anticipatory timing, and resultant audience expectation, is when it seems as though the audience (and Billy) have just been given brief reprieve from the balloon's torment by the appearance of a child in a similar situation at 00:03:42. The audience, Billy, and the other child feel relief and brief safety, both from the children finding a sort of comfort in being in a similar situation to one another, as well as the break from the violence. However, right as the scene feels almost comforting in how long it has been since one of the balloons hurt someone, at 00:04:02 a jet swiftly darts across the screen and kills the child, leaving only the balloon to drift away. We then cut back to Billy's once-more distressed expression as he is dropped one final time and the screen cuts to black. The timing of the jet's move-in and move-out of frame is incredibly fast, jarring on purpose to shock the audience.