DIRECTED BY: Don Hertzfeldt
FEATURING: Julia Pott, Winona Mae
PLOT: The third generation clone of a little girl time travels to the present to deliver advice to the four-year old.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: We’ll cite Don Hertzfeld’s own words, speaking of his inspirations for “World of Tomorrow,” in the film’s favor: “..I’ve always been a big fan of pulpy science fiction, the optimistic yet somehow terrifying science fiction of the 40’s and 50’s, where logic took a back seat to some really giant, weird ideas.” This film was conceived in a weird mindset, but working against this psychedelic stick-figure snippet is—as is often the case with shorts—its length. It’s a stunning work on both the visual and emotional planes, but as good as “World of Tomorrow” is, is it weird and important enough to justify bumping a full-length film off the List to make place for it? If only Hertzfeld would make a proper, weird feature-length film, and end this dilemma for us…
COMMENTS: “Our viewscreens allow us to witness any event in history,” says the visitor from the future with some degree of pride, although she casually concedes that “our more recent history is often just comprised of images of other people watching viewscreens.” Such is the World of Tomorrow as imagined by stick-figure animator Don Hertzfeld. The film is scripted around the recorded utterances of Hertzfeld’s four year old niece Winona Mae, which were later adapted into a screenplay. The girl’s ebullient proclamations of wonder are met with calm acknowledgment by her own clone, who has traveled through time on the eve of the apocalypse to implant this very memory (and to extract another one). Young Emily (referred to as “Emily Prime”) can’t understand the significance of the momentous exchange, focusing on the surface of the vision, delighting her ability to change background colors with a word. For her part, the pontificating clone, who speaks in the emotionless tone of a British Siri, seems oblivious that her words of wisdom are going over the girl’s head. This leads to constant humorous exchanges between the two (“I have no idea what you’re talking about” deadpans the clone in response to some childish gibberish).
Hertzfeld’s characters deliver their mismatched, wistful dialogue against a backdrop of constantly shifting colors. The animator retains the derp-y stick figures that have become his trademark, but digs into digital animation to create futuristic ooh-la-la wonders. Clean, precise geometric figures constantly drift through the frame like technological clouds, with neon static discharges bursting across the screen. Space is a deep purple expanse, and the Earth, seen from the moon, is covered with a grid of girders. Human memories (the kind people of the future will watch for solace) are fuzzy and shown at skewed angles, with unbalanced color that makes a field of grass glow yellow. The eye candy alone more than justifies this trip into the future.
The tone is resigned and melancholy, but not despairing. “Tomorrow”‘s morose vision of the future encompasses depressed robot poetry and shooting star corpses among its many ironic wonders. But while the film embodies the postmodern pessimism that concludes that technology is making us gradually less connected and less human, “Tomorrow”‘s direct emotional impact comes from tapping into that well of nostalgia for the innocence of childhood. Forget the future; every adult feels like a deteriorating third-generation copy of themselves who feels “a deep longing for something you cannot quite remember.” Life is “a beautiful visit, and then we share the same fate as the rest of the human race: dying horribly.” Tomorrow is a mixed blessing, at best, but Emily Prime represents hope and solace.
“World of Tomorrow” is now available streaming on Netflix, or it can be rented directly on-demand.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
“… within the absurdity lurks a sense of longing for a connection, a soulsick-ness.“–Collin Souter, RogerEbert.com (contemporaneous)