The World of Tomorrow trilogy
"We mustn't linger. It is easy to get lost in memories."
In the first episode of the World of Tomorrow trilogy, Emily is a little girl who is taken on a mind-bending trip through time by a clone of herself from 227 years in the future.
In the second episode, World of Tomorrow: The Burden of Other People's Thoughts, Emily is visited by a backup clone of herself from an even-more distant future, and together, they must venture into each other's psyches in order to restore the clone's deteriorating mind.
In the third episode of World of Tomorrow: The Absent Destinations of David Prime, Emily 9, a clone from the future, implants a hidden memory in the mind of an infant named David. Years later, that memory sends David across the far reaches of time and space to solve a deadly mystery involving his own time-traveling future selves.
It makes sense when you watch it…
Don Hertzfeldt will forever occupy a special place in my heart, if for nothing else, than for the short cartoon that floated around the early days of the internet where a happy little popcorn guy dances merrily to a jaunty tune, only to look down in shock and horror at the sudden torrent of blood shooting out from between its legs, before looking into the camera, to cry out to the audience in plaintive desperation: “For the love of god, and all that is holy… my anus is bleeding!”
So understandably, when I saw that a new Hertzfeldt short was going to be shown before one of the movies at Fantastic Fest, I was totally ready.
Or at least, I thought I was…
WORLD OF TOMORROW is a surprisingly funny, touching, and melancholy ode to mortality, love, and the human condition, all contained within a sparsely animated sci-fi short film featuring endless clones, future dystopias on the edge of destruction, and the time-traveling adventure of a precocious three year old girl from 2015 Scotland and her cloned far-future self. It’s a film so captivating, that at this point, I don’t even recall what the feature length film that followed it at Fantastic Fest was anymore.
“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away, and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well, and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.” — Future Clone Emily to Emily Prime
Musing on the paradoxical impermanence and persistence of love, as well as a cautionary tale about the dangers of living in the past, its a series that asks… what would you be willing to do for love?
“That is the thing about the present, Emily Prime. You only appreciate it when it is the past.” — Future Clone Emily
Weird and dark and surprisingly clever, peppered with disarmingly charming humor, mostly from the comedic timing between voice actress Julia Pott, and Hertzfeldt’s real life toddler niece, Winona Mae, THE WORLD OF TOMORROW is not just a story of the pursuit of love across space and time and beyond the known universe, but the intrinsic value of that pursuit.
Simply put, it’s one of the best and sweetest sci-fi series ever made.
Big thumbs up.
