World of Tomorrow (film)
| World of Tomorrow | |
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_POSTER.jpg) |
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| Directed by | Don Hertzfeldt |
| Produced by | Don Hertzfeldt |
| Written by | Don Hertzfeldt |
| Starring |
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| Cinematography | Don Hertzfeldt |
| Edited by | Don Hertzfeldt |
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Production
company |
Bitter Films
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Release date
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Running time
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17 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
World of Tomorrow is a 2015 American animated science fiction short film written, directed, produced, animated, and edited by Don Hertzfeldt. It features the voice of Julia Pott, opposite Hertzfeldt's four-year-old niece Winona Mae, who was recorded while drawing and playing. Her spontaneous, natural vocal reactions and questions were then edited into the story to create her character. The film was nominated for Best Animated Short Film at the 2016 Academy Awards.
A communication unit in a white room begins to ring, and a little girl (voiced by Winona Mae) runs toward the machine, where she excitedly presses a random series of buttons on the console until a live video transmission appears on the screen.
The person in the transmission is a woman (voiced by Julia Pott) and addresses the young girl as Emily. Speaking in a robotic monotone throughout their entire conversation, the woman introduces herself as an adult third-generation clone of Emily contacting her from 227 years in the future. The clone Emily then explains to the original Emily regarding the complex cloning process that humans have devised in an attempt to achieve immortality, as well as describing other crude forms of life extension that less affluent members of humanity can afford. The clone Emily goes on to explain how she was able to contact the original Emily through an experimental and dangerous form of physical time travel. The clone Emily proceeds to transport the original Emily into the clone's present time in the future via time travel.
The original Emily disappears from the white room and safely reappears inside an interactive space that the clone Emily describes as "the Outernet": a neural network that is a technologically advanced version of the Internet. At this point, the clone Emily begins to address her original as Emily Prime. The clone Emily and Emily Prime briefly engage in drawing simple figures in the air, before the clone Emily invites Emily Prime to view a selection of her memories.
The first memory is one from the clone Emily's childhood, involving a controversial exhibit in a museum where a male clone without a brain, nicknamed affectionately by the public as David, was kept in stasis; she recalls her frequent visits to David over the years and expresses her sadness when he finally died at the age of 72. The second memory is of the clone Emily's first job, supervising solar-powered and sentient worker robots on the surface of the Earth's moon. She had programmed the robots to fear death and darkness, and they, as a result, are compelled to be in constant motion, always walking where the light of the sun hits the lunar surface. Too expensive to remove, the robots remain on the moon in endless movement, occasionally sending depressed poetry. Due to a recession in the lunar economy, Emily Clone was sent home after six lunar cycles and separated from an inanimate rock that she had grown to love.
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