Directed, edited and produced by Joel Allen Schroeder
Featuring Seth Green, Berkeley Breathed (Bloom County) and Bill Amend (Foxtrot)
Quick take: How can I not be excited about a doc on the creator of the greatest comic strip of all time, Calvin and Hobbes? Even if it’s awful and just people talking about Bill Watterson’s greatness, well duh, but I’ll be happy.
Release date: November 15th (in theaters and on iTunes)
Also screening this weekend at the New Orleans Film Festival and later this month at the Savannah Film Festival
Synopsis, via the film’s website:
Calvin & Hobbes dominated the Sunday comics in thousands of newspapers for over 10 years, having a profound effect on millions of readers across the globe. When the strip’s creator, Bill Watterson, retired the strip on New Year’s Eve in 1995, devoted readers everywhere felt the void left by the departure of Calvin, Hobbes, and Watterson’s other cast of characters, and many fans would never find a satisfactory replacement.
It has now been more than a decade since the end of the Calvin & Hobbes era. Bill Watterson has kept an extremely low profile during this time, living a very private life outside of Cleveland, Ohio. Despite his quiet lifestyle, Mr. Watterson is remembered and appreciated daily by fans who still enjoy his amazing collection of work.
Mr. Watterson has inspired and influenced millions of people through Calvin & Hobbes. Newspaper readership and book sales can be tracked and recorded, but the human impact he has had and the value of his art are perhaps impossible to measure.
This film is not a quest to find Bill Watterson, or to invade his privacy. It is an exploration to discover why his ‘simple’ comic strip made such an impact on so many readers in the 80s and 90s, and why it still means so much to us today.