“That is the thing about the present, Emily Prime. You only appreciate it when it is the past.”
So says Emily 4, the monotone clone contacting her five-year-old grandmother in “World of Tomorrow,” the astounding, Oscar-nominated short from animator Don Hertzfeldt. This 17-minute masterpiece is a hauntingly beautiful rumination on today’s tech-oriented times; on the treacherous swamps of memory; and on the importance of appreciating our lives in the moment, the present. In its brisk running-time, “World of Tomorrow” (currently streaming on Netflix) explores bolder and loftier concepts than nearly all of 2015’s feature-length films—with ten times the pizzazz.
It takes several viewings to unpack the tightly-wound story. A kid-girl named Emily (Winona Mae) is contacted by her 4th-gen clone from 200 years into the future (Julia Pott). The film is essentially Emily 4’s extended monologue, as she relates the wonders of the Future to her kid-mother Emily Prime (and us). In Hertzfeldt’s futuristic vision, the Internet evolves into “The Outernet,” an abstract realm of consciousness that replaces the real world. The richest citizens can clone, time-travel and digitally store their memories in small black boxes so that, in theory, they’re able to live forever. (The poor are not so lucky.) Despite these innovations, however, Emily 4 ruefully laments the Future’s contradictory bleakness. She feels emotionally hollow, with no one to love. Hoping to contact her original self to see what went wrong, Emily Clone takes her young charge on a trip down Memory Lane to rediscover her past. But Emily Prime does not always listen. In response to the elder Emily’s ruminations, Emily Prime giggles, shoots marbles with stars in the sky and babbles “Wiggle wiggle wiggle.” Emily 4 is a slave to her past; Emily Prime just wants to play with her cars and crayons.
My initial reaction to “World of Tomorrow” appropriately mirrored Emily Prime’s reaction to her weird future self’s world. Viewing it back in April, I thought its chatty philosophizing was overbaked. Hertzfeldt’s sci-fi mumbojumbo went through one ear and out the other. I did, however, think it was immensely colorful and vibrant. I was delighted by the visuals, easily the best-looking Hertzfeldt film to date. So with that, I filed it under “G” for “Good” in my memory bank and went on with my week. I didn’t think about it again until a few weeks ago, when it was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Short. Interested to see if my reaction would change, I watched it on Netflix. Then I watched it again the next day. Then again with friends. Then again. And again. It was somewhere between the fifth or sixth viewing when I realized I was in the presence of something profound.
Don Hertzfeldt’s artistic progress uncannily matches his films’ narrative zig-zagging. His simple stick-figure-characters inhabit an equally sparse world of sketch paper white where anything in the artist’s imagination can (and does) happen. Hertzfeldt’s repulsive picture pool — filled with stitched wisdom teeth being pulled out through the nose, homicidal balloons, rectally-bleeding popcorn kernels (“Rejected”), and guys skinned alive and salted by grossed-out girls (“Ah, L’Amour!”) — is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. In his later cartoons, however, he has introduced a surprising, philosophical side. From “The Meaning of Life” (where he traces our Darwinian evolution and wonders whether we were worth the effort) to “It’s Such a Beautiful Day” (where we follow a mentally and terminally ill stick-man named Bill), Hertzfeldt suggests that comedy and tragedy are wholly inseparable in the grand scheme of our absurd lives.
What we’ve come to expect from his anti-comedy, however, cannot prepare you for “World of Tomorrow.” Its aesthetic maturity is so pronounced it feels removed from everything that came before it. And yet, at the same time, its nuance places everything that came before it in a stunning new context that solidifies Hertzfeldt’s position as one of our most original filmmakers. His film can stand alongside Chuck Jones’s “Duck Amuck” and the Wallace and Gromit cartoons as among the most accomplished animated shorts ever created.
For all its mesmerizing convolutedness, the takeaway from “World of Tomorrow” is fairly straightforward. The future is a terrifying place, and we’ve no way of knowing how it’ll pan out. So, in the end, it’s best to live in a present-minded state savoring each moment in our present, living and laughing and loving. There’s something fairly magical about our digital age when we can post Lake Tahoe photos on Instagram within seconds. Yet at the same time, a hologrammatic hollowness creeps behind these actions, and our surface character threatens to melt into irrelevance. Don Hertzfeldt’s masterpiece restores the solidity of this brave new world to us. The wonders that lie beyond our sunlit rooms are made relevant again in “World of Tomorrow.” Look closer. What a happy day it is.
Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.