World of Tomorrow

A sixteen-minute animated film. Emily is four. She is playing in front of a screen. A connection opens. The person on the other side is herself: a clone three generations later. The clone describes the future. People back up their consciousness, transfer it to clones, and postpone death that way. The transfer works badly. Something is lost with every copy and the clones' feelings fade by degrees. From there the film is a walk. The clone takes the child through her own memories. What she describes is strange. She fell in love with a rock, had a relationship with a fuel pump, married a man's clone in a museum. All of it comes from fear of death. The clone does not say so; the narrative shows it by placing things side by side. Emily understands none of it. Now and then she says something unrelated and laughs. What the narrative is interested in is not science fiction but remembering: its idea is that a life's meaning is in its memories, and that what gets copied is not memory but only information. The drawing is stick figures. Faces are two dots and a line; the backgrounds are coloured abstract fields. The plainness is deliberate. The feeling comes entirely from voice and text. Emily's voice is not scripted. Don Hertzfeldt recorded his own niece Winona Mae at four while she played and drew; what the child said on her own was placed into the script afterwards. The adult clone is voiced by Julia Pott and read entirely flat. The film is the first part of Hertzfeldt's trilogy. Don Hertzfeldt wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes idea-dense short animation and melancholy science fiction. Who it is not for: anyone expecting visual richness; the drawing is deliberately primitive and the film rests wholly on talk.