Plot
World of Tomorrow (2015)
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 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. Other memories the pair visit 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 that displayed anonymous memories as exhibits. It was in her art gallery that she met her husband: a descendant clone of David, the male clone who was displayed in a museum when she was a child. But as Emily Clone notes, her husband showed many signs of deterioration due to being a clone stemming from a much older generation. Their marriage was brief, as Emily Clone states that her husband died suddenly; thus, ending the David clone lineage. Emily Clone proceeded to harvest her deceased husband's memories, and reflects upon the memories of their relationship with feelings of melancholia.
In the final memory, the clone Emily reveals that in sixty days, Earth will be destroyed by a meteoroid. The clone Emily returns them both to the Outernet and reveals the true reason that she contacted Emily Prime: to retrieve an important memory from her original source before she is to die. The clone uses a handheld device to extract a memory of the original Emily and her mother walking together, which the clone Emily had forgotten. With the memory successfully retrieved, the clone Emily graciously thanks her original and adds that the specific memory will comfort her in the days leading to the destruction of Earth.
As the Outernet slowly begins to disintegrate around them, the clone Emily tells Emily Prime that she is honored to have met Emily Prime and that she will not contact her again. After saying goodbye, Emily Prime is accidentally transported by her clone into the distant past where she is seen standing in a grassy field surrounded by falling snow. She is then transported back into her present timeline, into the white room containing the communication unit where she answered the clone Emily's call. Emily Prime surveys the familiar space with a smile and notes in a singsong voice on "what a happy day it is" before she scampers out of the room.
Episode Two: The Burden of Other People's Thoughts (2017)
Emily Prime is busy drawing in a white room when she is interrupted by a time-travelling 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 then stumble upon a large raincloud that rains memories into a "Valley of buried memories" below and go to explore it. The memories can be tasted to reveal what they contain, with many of them being 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 then starts breaking down further, believing Emily Prime to be Felicia, and talking about living on the red planet together despite her objections. She tells Emily 6 to close her eyes, which transports Emily Prime back to the younger Emily 6, who ages rapidly back to the adult Emily 6 as she talks about memories of an unknown man who was reportedly accidentally transported by one of the Outernet's time-travelling units to "nowhere," as well as two memories of past Emily's dying in large amounts of snow. They are then transported to 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 then 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.
Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime (2020)
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."
Release and reception
World of Tomorrow
World of Tomorrow premiered at the 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. [5]
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. [6]
In 2016, Rolling Stone ranked World of Tomorrow tenth on its list of the "Greatest Animated Movies Ever." [7]
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, for all to watch. [11] Subsequent episodes are available to stream on Vimeo On-Demand.
Episode Two
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 .
Episode Three
World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime was released in 2020 to more positive reviews, including another "A+" from Indiewire . [14] Of the "dreamy, beloved" ongoing series, [2] The Film Stage noted, "Hertzfeldt has crafted what might be the crowning achievement of modern science fiction." [3]
Film critic David Ehrlich ranked World of Tomorrow Episode Three #3 on his list of the 25 Best Films of 2020. [15]
Episode Three was nominated for another Annie Award for Best Animated Short Subject in 2021. [16]
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. [17]
The first three World of Tomorrow episodes are also currently streaming on Vimeo. [18]
