World of Tomorrow (film)

World of Tomorrow
Theatrical release poster for Episode 1
Directed by	Don Hertzfeldt
Written by	Don Hertzfeldt
Produced by	Don Hertzfeldt
Starring	Julia Pott Winona Mae (Episodes 1 & 2) Jack Parrett (Episode 3)
Cinematography	Don Hertzfeldt
Edited by	Don Hertzfeldt
Production company	Bitter Films
Release dates	March 31, 2015 (Episode 1) October 20, 2017 (Episode 2) October 9, 2020 (Episode 3)
Running time	73 minutes 16 minutes (Episode 1) 23 minutes (Episode 2) 34 minutes (Episode 3)
Country	United States
Language	English

World of Tomorrow is a series of animated science fiction short films written, directed, produced, animated, and edited by Don Hertzfeldt.

The series began with World of Tomorrow (2015), followed by World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People's Thoughts (2017) and World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime (2020).

The first film was nominated for Best Animated Short Film at the 2015 Academy Awards.

All three films feature the voice of Julia Pott, frequently alongside 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 stories to create her character.

Indiewire called the first film "one of the greatest short films in the history of movies," and Rolling Stone ranked World of Tomorrow #10 on its list of the "Greatest Animated Movies Ever."^[1][2]

Of the "dreamy, beloved" ongoing series,^[3]The Film Stage noted, "Hertzfeldt has crafted what might be the crowning achievement of modern science fiction."^[4]

Hertzfeldt had long been interested in science fiction but hesitated to make a film set in a genre partly due to not wanting to be confined by it, noting, "it always seems to mean having to tread at least a little bit through overly familiar waters."^[5] Still, aspects of science fiction appeared in his film It's Such a Beautiful Day and his graphic novel The End Of The World. He felt that the science fiction genre would specially make sense for his first foray into digital animation.^[5]

The design of the film was influenced by science fiction novels and magazine covers of the 1950s and 60s, and by Hertzfeldt wanting the film to have a storybook aesthetic.^[5] He worked on the first film simultaneously with his couch gag guest appearance on The Simpsons. Both projects were the first time he had used digital animation in his work.^[5] Hertzfeldt was also responsible for the film's sound design and visual effects.

This section's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. Please help improve it by removing unnecessary details and making it more concise. (July 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

A young girl, Emily is contacted by a clone of her future self from 227 years in the future, created as a means of achieving immortality. They then travel to the clone's time and visit the Outernet, a future version of the Internet, where they explore memories of the clone's life.

The first memory is one from the clone Emily's childhood, where a male clone without a brain, nicknamed "David", is kept in stasis. Emily visits him until his death at age 72. Other memories the pair involve various jobs and loves of Emily's both on the moon and in outer space. Upon her return to Earth, the clone Emily opened an art gallery exhibiting anonymous memories. Here she meets a descendant clone of David, which ends prematurely with his own death, thus ending his family life.

Last, clone Emily reveals that in sixty days, Earth will be destroyed by a meteoroid. She reveals the true reason that she contacted Emily Prime: to retrieve an important memory from her original source before her own death, that of the original Emily and her mother walking together, which the clone had forgotten. The specific memory will comfort her in the days leading to Earth's destruction. Emily Prime returns home.

Emily Prime is busy drawing in a white room when she is interrupted by a time-traveling visitor; a sixth back-up copy of the adult third-generation clone who contacted Emily Prime in the previous episode, known as Emily 6 (voiced by Pott). This back-up Emily has difficulty controlling her emotions and was next in line to be a proper clone of Emily, but believes she lost her identity, and decided to replace her mind with a copy of Emily Prime's mind using a partially broken neural network on Emily 6's time machine.

The two then start to merge their consciousnesses; inside Emily 6's mind, Emily Prime meets a younger version of Emily 6, and they explore a cave and talk about Emily 6's bracelet, a birthday gift from her sister Felicia. The younger Emily 6 falls asleep, and Emily Prime is transported back to the adult Emily 6 in a location in the sub-consciousness called the "Bog of realism". In the bog waters, Emily 6 buried many "glimmers of hope" from her youth that she could not fulfill when she became an adult; one of the glimmers Emily Prime picks up is a dream of becoming a dancer in The Nutcracker ballet.

The two stumble upon a large cloud that rains memories into a "Valley of Buried Memories" below, and explore it. The memories can be tasted to reveal what they contain, with many of them having been inherited from other Emilys. Emily Prime finds a memory of a younger Emily 6 in a large tube with other numbered back-ups, all of whose eyes are closed except for Emily 6. Emily 6 finds a memory that has not happened to either of them yet, and tells Emily Prime not to think of a "baby dinosaur" later. Emily Prime then views three memories of her life where she is unexpectedly visited by Emily 6, and the fourth and seventh back-ups of Emily as they intrusively tour memories of Emily Prime's life to reminisce. Emily 6 finds a memory that transports them to a moment where her younger self kills an insect, describing it as the saddest day of her life and lecturing about the equality of souls before declaring that "clones are better".

Emily Prime spots the stasis tube containing the unconscious body of Felicia floating around a red planet in space. Emily 6 reveals that Felicia is the fifth back-up, Emily 5, having been separated from Emily 6 following Earth's destruction and reprogrammed to store the memories of a deceased wealthy family. They were best friends who both did not want to be named Emily, so they agreed to call Emily 5 "Felicia" and traded their bracelets, revealed to be identification tags, causing the numbers "5" and "6" on their foreheads to be switched. Emily 6 has since been searching for Emily 5 but does not remember the planet she is located at, causing her body to physically distort from thinking about it.

Emily 6's mind breaks down further, believing Emily Prime to be Felicia, and she talks about living on the red planet together. Emily tells Emily 6 to close her eyes. Emily 6 tells a story about a memory of an unknown man who was accidentally transported by one of the Outernet's time-traveling units to "nowhere." They are next transported into the "logic center" in Emily 6's brain, who urges them to escape as soon as possible as any illogical thought could damage her brain. Emily Prime thinks of a "baby dinosaur," and the system promptly collapses, shutting off Emily 6's mind.

The two are then transported into Emily Prime's mind, where Emily 6 begins to disappear, as the neural network finishes its job of replacing Emily 6's mind with a copy of Emily Prime's mind. To console Emily 6, Emily Prime gives her a ticket to The Nutcracker as a present, and Emily 6 dances to the suite as she contemplates her death. Emily 6 gives Emily Prime her bracelet, telling her to give it to Felicia when they meet again in 230 years, and asks Emily Prime to tell her a story. Emily Prime tells a brief story of a superhero with untapped powers who will save everyone from monsters, before Emily 6 fades from existence.

Emily Prime then returns to her room, with Emily 6 now having the same mind as Emily Prime, and gives her bracelet back to her, declaring herself to be her new sister. Suddenly, the fourth and seventh back-ups of Emily appear, telling Emily 6 that she "can't live in the past and all that" and she says goodbye to Emily Prime.

The ninth back-up of Emily, called Emily 9 (voiced by Pott), arrives from the future into the room of an infant named David (voiced by Jack Parrett), and records and implants a short transmission and a larger compressed file into his brain that will become activated when he is older. Years later, the adult David is floating in a rocket in space when the hidden memory reveals itself. Emily 9 explains to him that, as seen in the first Episode, a future clone of himself will marry a future clone of Emily, die suddenly, and have his memories harvested by Emily. This means David is the original, the "David Prime". Emily 9 believes that she is the only clone of Emily to have inherited those memories from her. She tells him there is something important that Emily never knew and tells them she has hidden these memories for him to recover.

The neural implant technology in David's brain is unable to fully unpack this message from the future, as it takes too much storage space. He resorts to deleting many skills in order to make enough space to access the information. The transmission from Emily 9 provides David Prime with the coordinates he needs to travel to an abandoned mining planet where she has hidden his memories.

Upon arrival, she explains further that he will need to walk for about a day across the planet to find an additional package with directions. The further David Prime walks and listens to directions from the transmissions however, the more skills and basic human functions he is forced to delete due to limited storage space, causing him to deteriorate mentally and physically. Along the way, he discovers many scattered corpses of what appears to be himself, which Emily 9 explains may be distant clones of himself from unknown future timelines who may have inherited dim memories of being on the planet, and tried and failed to make the trip themselves to her package. A homing beacon activates in David Prime's brain. It creates an arrow guiding him to the nearby package, which Emily 9 says will ensure that only him, the correct David, will know where to go. Towards the end of his trek, David Prime is forced to delete his ability to walk and he drags himself across the planet's rocky surface to finally reach the package. He also becomes poisoned by alien cave worms, which causes his tongue to fall out.

The hidden package contains another transmission from Emily 9 where she explains that in 72 years from his time, cloning will become commercially available, with two emergency back-up copies normally being created alongside one main clone. After the invention of time travel, the fourth back-up copy of David, David 4, will be employed as a secret agent called a "cleaner" who will have the special ability to freely work and travel in a shadow realm in-between individual points of time. Cleaners ensure that timelines are properly maintained but they are also rumored to perform duties for more sinister purposes, notably secret assassinations. She then explains that David 4 will abandon his co-workers while performing a job in-between time, and become obsessed when he sees Emily for the first time, in love with another clone of David. David 4 plans to secretly assassinate this David and take his place in his timeline, so he can live the rest of his life with Emily.

The only reason why his plan is known in the first place is because his roommate, the third-generation clone of David he was based on, read his diary where David 4's plan is fully spelled out after he'd disappeared the night before. The third-generation clone of David tries to create his own in-between time travel technology to directly confront David 4 before the plan can be carried out, but his experiments fail. He instead places himself in a stasis tube for upwards of a century in the hopes that technology will have publicly advanced enough for him to find a way then to stop the assassination. However, his time in the stasis tube causes him to mentally deteriorate. He seems to lose his mind and grows his hair into an unusual style. He places a younger clone of himself in a stasis tube as a museum exhibit titled Time is a Prison of Living Things, originally featured in the first episode. This third-generation David eventually disappears from the public record (his unusual hairstyle resembles the man who intentionally transported himself to "nowhere" in the second Episode, suggesting they are the same person). He left a message written on his wall: "Death is not a destination. It is the absence of one." It is unknown to public knowledge when or where the next generation clone of David was thereafter created.

Back in the present, Emily 9 reveals that she stored David's memories (the David clone from the first Episode) inside a Zorgbot, a robot companion she has hidden behind a nearby ridge. David Prime reinstalls the ability to walk and reaches the Zorgbot, but upon trying to activate it, he finds it is out of order from all the years of inactivity. 124 years later, a now very elderly David Prime living on Earth is shopping on the Internet when he discovers that Zorgbots have just been invented. He contacts a repair service. The old Zorgbot from the future is revealed to still be stored in his home, among many mementos of Emily. Once the Zorgbot is fixed, a final transmission from Emily is activated. She gives him the last known in-between time coordinates David 4 was seen at, as well as information on time travel equipment from her future timeline, in the hopes that David can continue working on the third-generation David's work of building a time machine he can use to stop the in-between time assassination.

Elderly David Prime creates a clone of himself and two back-up copies, David 2 and David 3, dissolving his body in the process and continuing his lineage. The second-generation clone of David is gradually educated in his youth through a cognitive examination program titled "Godbaby" and as he ages, he remembers the efforts of his lineage. This clone of David and David 2 & 3, now all adults, continue researching and experimenting with time travel technology. David 2 and 3 are clearly subservient to the main clone, seen washing dishes and vacuuming the home. David suits up and teleports away alone to stop the assassination.

In the memory museum where the fourth-generation clone of David dies, David 4 is about to assassinate him with a device that induces brain aneurysms when the second-generation clone of David heroically appears behind David 4 and kills him, stopping the murder. David takes a sigh of relief but is suddenly killed himself, by David 3 who has built his own time pack. David 3 is then killed by David 2, who appears behind *him*. Two cleaners are drawn to the murder scene, and are both also killed by David 2's aneurysm gun. The last man standing, David 2 carries out the original assassination and kills the fourth-generation clone of David before leaving. In real-time, the fourth-generation clone of David collapses and dies next to the clone of Emily, as seen in the first Episode.

David 2 returns to his home in the past, rents out his apartment and clones himself, creating the third-generation clone of David. This David's memories are shown to be heavily edited. He drops this David's unconscious body off in the apartment, and teleports away. By scanning the contents of the Zorgbot, David 2 is then able to locate Emily 9 on the mining planet, from when she recorded her message to his predecessor. We see her finish recording the instructions into the Zorgbot, and shortly afterwards, David 2 appears behind her with his time pack. She says, "Hello David."

World of Tomorrow premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Grand Jury Prize for Short Film. World of Tomorrow was released on-demand on Vimeo in March 2015, simultaneously with its continuing theatrical run in film festivals. At the end of its film festival run, the film won over 40 awards. World of Tomorrow won two Crystal Awards from the Annecy Animation Festival: a Special Jury Award and the Audience Award. The film also won two awards from the Ottawa International Animation Festival: Best Script and the Audience Award. It later won the animation industry's Annie Award for Best Animated Short of 2015.^[6]

Critical response was universally positive, with Indiewire calling the short film "one of the best films of 2015", The Dissolve naming it "one of the finest achievements in sci-fi in recent memory". World of Tomorrow has an approval rating of 100% on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 8 reviews, and an average rating of 9.80/10.^[7]

In 2016, Rolling Stone ranked World of Tomorrow tenth on its list of the "Greatest Animated Movies Ever."^[2]

In 2016, the film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.^[8][9]

In 2019, the film critics of Indiewire ranked the short film seventeenth on its list of the "100 Best Movies of the Decade".^[10]

In 2022, Hertzfeldt uploaded the first episode to YouTube.^[11] Subsequent episodes are available to stream on Vimeo On-Demand.

World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People's Thoughts premiered in 2017 and received rare "A+" reviews from Indiewire and Collider, where it was described as "another soulful sci-fi masterpiece."^[12] The Daily Beast called it "a must-see animated masterpiece" and "one of the best films of the year."^[13]

An image from World of Tomorrow Episode Two appears in the album artwork of the Arcade Fire record, We.^[14]

In 2024, World of Tomorrow Episode Two was ranked #5 on Indiewire's list of the "Best Sequels of the 21st Century".^[15]

World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime was released on-demand worldwide on October 9, 2020. Unlike its predecessors, it was unable to premiere in theaters due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

It received positive reviews, including another "A+" from Indiewire.^[16][17] Of the "dreamy, beloved" ongoing series, The Film Stage wrote, "Hertzfeldt has crafted what might be the crowning achievement of modern science fiction."^[18]

World of Tomorrow Episode Three appeared in theaters for the first time in 2023 as part of a special World of Tomorrow program with the Alamo Drafthouse cinemas, called An Evening with Don Hertzfeldt, Who Will Not Be There.^[19][20]

Film critic David Ehrlich ranked World of Tomorrow Episode Three #3 on his list of the 25 Best Films of 2020.^[21]

In 2021, the film was nominated for an Annie Award for Best Animated Short, Hertzfeldt's 4th nomination in the category.^[22]

A Blu-ray titled World of Tomorrow: The First Three Episodes was released in 2021, collecting the first three short films plus a booklet of production notes, a deleted scene, and a related new animated short called On Memory.^[23]

A month before Episode Three's release, Don stated on Twitter, in response to a fan question about a possible Blu-ray release, that the series isn't a trilogy, hinting at additional episodes.^[24] Don later confirmed plans for future episodes in a post-release interview with Indiewire, stating that he had ideas but didn't know what his plans would be due to the COVID-19 pandemic.^[25]

In March 2021, Don gave an update during an interview with Gizmodo, estimating it would be "another couple years" until the release of Episode Four if he didn't reach a deal with a streaming service.^[26]

The bonus booklet included with the Blu-ray release of the first three episodes confirmed that Episode 3 was definitively not the end and that he would return to the series at some point, suggesting that it could potentially go all the way up to Episode 9.

The first film won 42 awards, including:

• Grand Jury Prize for Short Film, Sundance Film Festival
• Best Animated Short, SXSW
• Best Animated Short, Annie Awards
• Steven Goldmann Visionary Award, Nashville Film Festival
• Grand Prix, Anifilm Třeboň
• Best Film, Fantoche Animation Festival
• Golden Zagreb for Creativity and Artistic Achievement, Animafest Zagreb
• Best Script, Ottawa Animation Festival
• Audience Award, Ottawa Animation Festival
• Audience Award, Annecy International Animated Film Festival
• Special Jury Distinction, Annecy International Animated Film Festival
• Grand Jury Prize, St. Cloud Film Festival
• Scientific Merit Award, Imagine Science Film Festival
• Best Short Film, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema
• Best Animated Short, Dallas International Film Festival
• Best Animated Short, Omaha Film Festival
• Best Animated Short, Sarasota Film Festival
• Audience Award, Vienna Independent Shorts
• Audience Award, Glasgow Short Film Festival
• Audience Award, Independent Film Festival of Boston
• Audience Award, Flatpack Film Festival
• Audience Award, Montreal International Animation Film Festival
• Special Jury Mention, Regard Sur Le Court Film Festival
• Special Jury Mention, Fest Anča International Animation Festival
• Best Animated Film, Alhambra Theatre Film Festival
• Honorary Mention, Prix Ars Electronica
• Jury Prize,^[27] Utopiales
• Best Animated Short Subject, Annie Awards
• 88th Academy Awards: Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film (nomination).^[28]

In December 2015, Hertzfeldt received a special award from the Austin Film Critics Association, "in celebration of a career of remarkable short filmmaking and contributions to animation spanning two decades, with the 2015 award-winning "World of Tomorrow" being recognized as his best work to date."^[29]

• World of Tomorrow at IMDb
• World of Tomorrow on Vimeo
• World of Tomorrow (free) on YouTube
• A.V. Club review of World of Tomorrow (2015)

• World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People's Thoughts at IMDb
• World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People's Thoughts on Vimeo

• World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime at IMDb
• World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime on Vimeo
• Indiewire review of World of Tomorrow Episode Three (2020)