Another look at "World of Tomorrow", now available online
Thursday, April 2, 2015 at 8:30PM 
Tim here. First things first: you won't spend a more worthwhile $3.99 or use up a more gratifying 16 minutes and 29 seconds this week than you could by watching World of Tomorrow, the newest short by animator Don Hertzfeldt. You perhaps recall it as one of the most rapturously received films of any length coming out of this year's Sundance Film Festival, including a rave from the Film Experience's own Michael Cusumano (a rave that popped up in the short's official trailer), which traditionally means a long crawl through the festivals until eventually most people get a chance to see it a year or more after the hype has worn off. But on March 31, Hertzfeldt made it available on Vimeo, in a continuation of the filmmaker's first experiment in an all-digital environment. So now the rest of us get to see what made so many critics lose their minds.
The answer is genius. Pure, uncut genius is what made those critics lose their minds.
It would be unfair to expect anything to live up to the standard set by the director's last project, the feature-length It's Such a Beautiful Day, and World of Tomorrow doesn't quite. Still, taken on its own terms, it's as ambitious and creative as any work of animation – hell, of any work of filmmaking generally – in years, cramming enough concepts within its compact frame to power an entire season of a television sci-fi series, and leaving none of them feeling under-explored.
As a story, there's not a whole lot to it: little Emily (voiced by Hertzfeldt's four-year-old niece Winona Mae) receives a message on some kind of futuristic viewing screen from a third-generation clone of herself (voiced by Julia Pott, an outstanding indie animator in her own right).
After exchanging some pleasantries that go corkscrew-shaped in a dryly absurd way (the comedy isn't exactly like anything Hertzfeldt has done before, but I can't imagine it failing to satisfy any fans of Rejected), the cloned Emily zaps Emily Prime into the future, explaining the state of the world in the 23rd Century and eventually revealing why she reached out to her clone-grandma.
What fills the running time in lieu of incidents are ideas, dense and probing ideas about where technology is circa 2015 and what might happen if it keeps evolving the way things are right now. It is not the rant of a technophobe – World of Tomorrow could not exist without modern technology – but it's not very enthusiastic about the way that human beings have devoted so much of our cultural energy, intelligence, and resources to finding an endless new chain of ways to cut ourselves off from the world and other people. And the film does not blame the internet for this: it blames the basic human capacity for willfully chasing isolation, the same theme that has driven much of his work.
The film is "about" technology, both as a story and a piece of animation; it was born as an experiment not to be seen by the public, for Hertzfeldt to practice using a computer instead of paper and pencil. It is, in a very real sense, just a doodle that grew up into enough of a real project to stand on its own (though its ad hoc genesis probably explains why the themes of It's Such a Beautiful Day inform it so clearly), and that doodling still shows up as one watches the finished product. The space of the Outernet, which is all we ever see of the future, is a lot of movement and design for its own sake, moving shapes and designs that are gorgeous and fearfully crisp and bold; while the characters are still the rough stick figures with smudged-in faces of Hertzfeldt's earlier work, the film clearly needed to be made digitally to facilitate the purity of lines and colors that dominate so much of it.
t's captivating to look at while signifying nothing, creating a busy and distracting space in which nothing happens. Which is nothing if not a cutting criticism of the way most of us use the internet here in the world of today.
It sounds grim because it is, and I'm leaving plenty of its grimness untouched (like its barely visible portrait of just how wretched class warfare of the future looks, or its ultra-bleak final reveal). It's also hilarious. Hertzfeldt's use of his niece's unscripted rambling provides the short with unbearably adorable non sequiturs – American animation hasn't seen a more charming toddler since Boo in Monsters, Inc. – and turns it into a tennis match of ridiculous, silly scripted reactions for the cloned Emily, with Pott's monotonous line readings and her handful of curious mispronunciations adding exactly the right layer of comic surrealism.
The mixture of oddball humor and sober, pitch-black considerations of the worst tendencies of humans combine to make World of Tomorrow one of the most idiosyncratic and fascinating films in a long time, regardless of medium, regardless of length. It's heavy with complicated ideas that it presents in the brightest way possible, and it's as much fun as anything with such depressive, even apocalyptic tones could ever be. I can't imagine the rest of 2015 producing anything that is, minute-for-minute, as challenging and creative as this.
Grade: A
Reader Comments (4)
I need to see this but I always feel like I have to steel myself for Hertzfeld even though i love his work. It's so funny but so nihilistc too
Yup, loved this. It should be noted that the Vimeo-on-Demand stuff is GLOBAL, which is how I was able to see and was glad to be able to. So very, very great and sad yet beautiful. Not quite as good as WHAT A BEAUTIFUL DAY, but not much is (I also miss his own narration, but his niece is hilariously droll even if she had no idea what she was doing).
As I think nothing can top his It's just a Beautiful Day, World of Tomorrow still blew me away. Such sad but often hilarious tale.
Best film I've seen so far this year.