LogFAQs > #929717739

33. World of Tomorrow (19 points)
Nominated by: Place (1/5 remaining)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdV1uFwtCpo

Importance: 5
Fear: 5
Snake: 9

I'm so happy that I finally sat down and watched this! What a gorgeous meditation on the human experience. Though the film is short, it packs so many philosophical and sci-fi ideas into its runtime that it could make many 2 hour films blush and turn away in shame. The film features a little girl named Emily, who, after wildly pressing buttons on a computer display, gets a visit from her older self. It's a lot more than that though, as the older Emily explains she's actually the latest in a series of Emily clones as part of humanity's many attempts to achieve immortality. Together, they go on a very abstractly animated adventure, with a facade of simplicity running through almost scenes that belies deeper, contextual meaning in both setting and in the stick-figured characters. One of the best examples is the earliest; older, clone Emily explains the complicated cloning process, while young Emily simply responds, "I had lunch today."

Backgrounds are equally as evocative, showing what they need to to establish a location and create feelings of child-like wonderment & grand spectacle, but also a strange coldness, alienation, and lack of belonging. Don Hertzfeldt mines so much darkness from a future that doesn't seem as distant as is portrayed, utilizing the blackest of dry humor, such as when Emily's grandpa sends out letters from his digital consciousness, simply being a series of clearly desperate "no's" read in the robotic tone of clone Emily's voice. There are other touches of existential horror as well, such as the brainless human clone stuck in the museum for years on end, or the long abandoned, purposeless moon robots programmed to always keep moving forward in the fear of death. Yet, I just love that there's always young Emily, in her child-like innocence, unfazed by technological innovations or even the imminent destruction of Earth in clone Emily's future. Ultimately, World of Tomorrow is not a film that wants us to be down on life or view it negatively. What it does want from us is to accept that those negative parts of life are just as real as the positives, and that we shouldn't push either extreme away. Life is such an incredible thing that we can, paraphrasing clone Emily here, be very proud of our sadness because it means we are more alive, and also just take solace in the comfort of a lingering, half-forgotten memory or fall in love with a moon rock. It's these two extremes that represented in both sides of Emily.

I guess Emily said it better than I ever could: "This is your future, Emily Prime. It is sometimes a sad life, and it is a long life. You will feel a deep longing for something you cannot quite remember. It will be a beautiful visit, and then we shall share the same fate as the rest of the human race: dying horribly."

Man, there's just so much to discuss here that's really hard to put into words. It truly is the definition of a visual piece I think, meant to be watched and taken it by its emotion and feelings more than anything. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.
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I try in vain to slumber, my reveries gripped by violent terror. My only salvation, the shock of awakening. Something is very, very wrong here.