The 4-year old girl Emily is visited by a woman who is her clone from 227 years in the future. The clone Emily brings the kid Emily to the future to show her the new Internet, the Outernet; her job in the future as a robot supervisor on the Moon; a museum exhibit of a clone without a brain... The kid Emily is mostly oblivious to all of this. The clone Emily tells that in the future an asteroid will hit and destroy Earth, so she takes one memory of the kid Emily. The kid Emily is returned back to the present... The kid Emily is contacted by the 6th generation clone Emily, 230 years in the future, who is dysfunctional and needs to scan the kid Emily's memories to repair her gaps. The kid Emily is returned to the present, and Emily no. 6 to the future.
In a contrast to modern animated movies which have overwhelming animation yet underwhelming stories, Don Hertzfeldt's cult short movies "World of Tomorrow" I & II seem to have sucked all the effort from meticulous animation and instead invested it into a staggering, imaginative story. "World of Tomorrow" uses simple sketch-like animation and takes on the kids' curious question of how they will look like in the future to the extreme, here telling a story of the 4-year old Emily meeting her grown up clone from 227 years in the future, which shows her a glimpse of how the world looks like in the 23rd century. In doing so, Hertzfeldt dwells on some thought-provoking, almost surreal philosophical contemplations on how humans change with technology, and what is the border of perversion of human meddling with nature ("For end-of-life procedures for our less affluent citizens in the lower classes, the face of a deceased loved one can be peeled off, preserved, and stretched over the head of a simple animatronic robot"). Almost as some sort blend between the concept of a man from the future meeting his ancestor of "Back to the Future" and clones of "Gemini Man", "World of Tomorrow" fascinates thanks to a contrast of the 4-year old Emily's naivety and her clone's wisdom ("That is the thing about the present, Emily Prime. You only appreciate it when it is the past"; "Now is the envy of all of the dead"). Part II is weaker, since it falls too much into the abstract, until it almost feels like an experimental film, yet even it has several incredible moments, such as Emily's clones no. 4, 6 and 7 being "memory tourists" and thus visiting Emily as a kid reading under a tree, Emily as a grown up during a date, and Emily as an old, sick woman inside a futuristic medical unit. The "broken" clone no. 6 feels awkward, yet some of the lines are impressive ("I have memories of dying two times, and these memories traveling across three Emilys"). The story shows a future so advanced that it became alien to humans of the present, fittingly consolidating its theme of the link between the change of time and the change of mankind.
Grade:+++
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