World of Tomorrow Episodes #1-#3 (by Don Hertzfeldt, 2015, 2017, 2020, USA)
Filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt has been making beautiful, strange, singular heart breaking hilarious animations for almost thirty years now (and he's only 48!!).
His immediately recognizable style often involves simply drawn characters with a comedic bent who are thrown into absurd, increasingly dark situations.
As Hertzfeldt has progressed, he has pushed the limits more and more of combining laugh out loud absurdist comedy and increasingly dark, heart breaking, tragic counterpoint.
In many ways, this storytelling has hit an apotheosis in a series of on-going science fiction episodes titled WORLD OF TOMORROW which he started in 2015.
Though he has released three episodes, he has implied that the series is open ended and may even reach nine episodes when all is said and done.
WORLD OF TOMORROW, the first episode, focuses on a little girl, Emily, visited by an Emily clone from the future. The Emily clone reveals that a technology allows people to transfer their consciousness to clones (while making back-up clones of lesser quality just in case) so they never truly die. The Emily clone from the future reveals Emily's own strange future in which she becomes obsessed with a clone named David, falls in love, then watches him die with no explanation. The Emily Clone from the future has come to extract an Emily prime memory that will comfort the Emily Clone who knows earth is about to be destroyed by an asteroid.
This first episode marks a stunning advancement in Hertzfeldt's animation approach by combining his simple comedic style with incredible digital animated effects.
It also pushes his contrarian funny-dark, absurdist-tragic tonal project to an extreme. Hertzfeldt movies have always been very funny while simultaneously feeling a little too self-aware or even self-pitying. But like all truly talented moviemakers, Hertzfeldt has found a way to make his own obsessions, sensibilities engaging to others.
WORLD OF TOMORROW is replete with fascinating sci-fi conjectures and ideas (which get explored further in the next two episodes) while leaning into a kind of "humanity is f@#ked" bittersweet melancholia that is almost too much.
WORLD OF TOMORROW EPISODE TWO: THE BURDEN OF OTHER PEOPLE'S THOUGHTS may, interestingly, continue that weird sci-fi fantasy trend where the second movie ends up being the strongest of the bunch. While all three episodes are amazing in their own ways, EPISODE TWO seems to dance on the razor edge of tone the best. In this episode, Emily Clone #6 visits Emily Prime to extract Emily Prime's consciousness into her own as Emily Clone #6's consciousness is unstable and hard to bear. The majority of this short (each short runs between 17mns-33mns) is a trippy voyage into Emily Prime's and Emily 6's subconscious during the transfer. Time travel becomes an increasingly important story element in each of the first three episodes. And so other Emily Clones appear as "time travel tourists". In the first two episodes, the main dynamic is between Emily Prime, a young happy bubbly girl voiced by Hertzfeldt's niece, and Emily Clones, voiced by adult Julia Pott.
Episode two does a nice job of anchoring the Hertzfeldt funny/bittersweet/pitch dark/tragic tonal loop de loops in a clear thematic foundation. Episode two is really an exploration of memory, living in the present versus seeking out a mythical past or future where things were better.
Episode two also complicates the story with new layers added onto the World of Tomorrow episode one. This layering, which will be taken to a new extreme in Episode three, is fascinating but also challenging.
Each subsequent episode becomes denser than the episode before leading the viewer to wonder how one will be able to process a potential episode nine.
WORLD OF TOMORROW EPISODE THREE: THE ABSENT DESTINATIONS OF DAVID PRIME Here the story abandons the Emily Prime (child) interacting with an Emily clone (adult) approach. Instead, we are suddenly with David Prime, whose later clone Emily will fall in love with as an adult. Emily Nine, a later clone of Emily Prime, appears as a buried memory in David Prime's brain, to reveal a murder plot against David Prime that will abruptly end Emily's and David's love affair. The love affair we saw occur in Episode One.
There are strong resonances here of French moviemaker Chris Marker's avant garde sci-fi masterpiece LA JETEE. The probability also that time travel can't prevent things from happening in the past also gets the center spotlight here. Hertzfeldt introduces a new sci-fi concept, ripe to be stolen by a thieving major studio, of clones who travel "in-between" time allowing them to build things or assassinate people in the blink of an eye.
Some of Hertzfeldt's work has always felt heavy with a kind of anger or frustration at romantic relationships. And EPISODE THREE has the clearest connection to these earlier works by Hertzfeldt. Emily Nine seemingly abuses David Prime with her unreasonable demands on him to save their romantic relationship. But thankfully as the movie progresses, this strain becomes something more complicated and interesting (versus ex-girlfriend bashing).
***
The three episodes are wild, ambitious, and mind-blowing in their ability to combine real speculative science fiction with comedy and emotion. Hertzfeldt is finding ways to grow as an artist while staying true to some of his lifelong themes. A necessary evolutionary trait for creative artists who want to go the distance.
While this viewer's brain is still sore from trying to absorb all the density (maybe it's just being overloaded with Dad concerns and other things), these movies are thoroughly satisfying.
It's critical to discover movies like these that are doing crazy ambitious things in this day and age. It gives you heart that cinema still has frontiers waiting to be crossed.
Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.
