Don Hertzfeldt is one of those rare artists that, from the moment he put pen to paper, seemed to have fully realized a mature voice and visual style. His very first movie, a short he made for a freshman year college film class, is remarkable not only because it won the HBO Comedy Arts Festival Grand Prize for “World’s Funniest Cartoon” in 1998, but because it already embodies Hertzfeldt’s characteristic wry, sick sense of humor and his keen insight into a peculiar kind of existential angst.

Hertzfeldt’s works in contradictions, between adult and child, the humorous and horrifying, all wrapped up in a visual style that is seemingly crude and simple, but is the product of a painstaking, laborious process for which Hertzfeldt utilizes the same kind of antique animation camera that shot many of the earliest Disney cartoons. Hertzfeldt doesn’t do much digital, and he doesn’t do commercial, which is one of the reasons why he has garnered such a cult following, distributing his films independently and traveling with them to in-person theater screenings. Hertzfeldt’s latest stop will be the Texas Theater this Friday where he will screen the third and most ambitious short in his acclaimed “Everything Will Be OK” trilogy. We sat down with the filmmaker ahead of the appearance.

FrontRow: What attracts you to your particular animation process, which is very meticulous and time consuming? Is the grueling aspect of the process important to the finished product in some way?

Don Herzfeld: The best thing I can say about the slow, grueling process is that it sure gives you a lot of time to think about the project as you go. And inevitably I tend to get better ideas over those weeks and months and have all the time in the world to improve things. But beyond that, it’s just the nature of the beast. There really is no easy way to animate, whether you do it with a keyboard or a pencil, if it’s going to be done properly it’s by nature going to be a very arduous, frame-by-frame crawl. Really, no short cuts. But it’s attractive, particularly if you’re working on a low budget, because you can do anything -  literally put anything on the screen – and you don’t have any of the constraints of live action.

FR: Who are some filmmakers, animated or otherwise, that you are watching these days?

DH: Most of my movie heroes have always been live-action people. I don’t really find myself watching animation that much. I don’t know, maybe it’s like how the guy who spends all day cleaning the bowling alley lanes doesn’t really want to go bowling in his free time? I just got back from Sundance a few weeks ago, and all the best stuff I saw this year were documentaries: “The Imposter,”  “Room 237,”  “The Queen of Versailles” – all really great and worth hunting down. When I travel to a festival like that, where everything’s sort of unknown and untested, I’ve been sort of trained to see as many of the documentaries as I can. If you get a ticket to a dramatic film, and it’s a dog, you’ve sort of lost the evening. But with a documentary, even it’s made badly, at least you’ll probably still learn something.

FR: You distribute your works yourself and you don’t take commercial gigs. Does it bother you that your style has been copied in a number of commercials, ads, and things like that?

DH: It bothers me because most people who don’t know me better seem to just assume that I did them. So not only do I not get paid for the commercial gig, I get blamed for the bad work. So I’m looking forward to the day when I’m unpopular again and not so cool for corporate people to lift stuff from. Though a weird side of me, after seeing artwork from “rejected” get inexplicably morphed into terrible ad stuff over the years, I kind of can’t wait to see what strange and horrible things they would do with the “everything will be ok” films.

FR: I saw you keep finished drawings in fire proof safes, which seems like a prudent practice. Have you had any disasters with losing work, accidents, etc.?

DH: Not yet, thankfully, but I have been so exhausted on a production before that I shot for about two weeks only to find that I’d forgotten to load any film in the camera. I’d been going to the studio every night and carefully shuffling papers beneath the camera in a sort of sad ritual.

FR: I’ve heard you are working on a feature film – can you share any details on what we can expect in terms of content and style?

DH: I’m afraid i can’t say much yet, but it’s not related to any of the shorts. I have no idea where the funding for such a thing will come from. All the short films were paid for out of pocket over the years, and not a single one would’ve ever seen the light of day if they’d have had to been traditionally “pitched.” So it’s going to be an interesting road to see if any support and funding for this sort of strange and very different animal exists. It sounds like I may need to flee toEuropeto get it done. But I’m looking forward to the chance to collaborate with some other artists and work with a crew and a real budget for a change – especially not having to draw everything over and over again by myself. I think even if the whole thing fails, it will at least be really interesting.