From the absurdist humor of “Rejected” to the bittersweet
melancholy of “It’s Such a Beautiful Day,” animator Don Hertzfeldt
has made a career of combining minimalist, almost crude drawings with big ideas
that tilt toward the existential.
His latest
film, “World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts,”
is Hertzfeldt’s follow-up to his original
Oscar-nominated short masterpiece (if you need to catch up, that first episode
is currently available on Netflix), set in a distant future where humans have
achieved immortality through cloning.
The story
begins as the first film’s sweetly oblivious heroine, a little girl named Emily
Prime (voiced by Hertzfeldt’s niece, Winona Mae) is
once again visited by one of her adult clones from the future. This time, the
unexpected guest is Emily 6 (Julia Pott) who it turns out is an incomplete
backup copy of a third generation clone, and needs Emily Prime’s memories to
make her whole. The new film presents Hertzfeldt with
the opportunity to further explore the complex, strange universe he’s created,
as Emily Prime is led on a tour through the bizarre, lonely existence of a
clone and witnesses what’s to become of humanity in the generations to come.
For a film
consisting solely of stick figures wandering through abstract digital
environments, “World of Tomorrow Episode Two” achieves a prolonged silliness,
punctuated with moments of profound and sometimes devastating insights about
the nature of identity, memory, and consciousness. The effect is simultaneously
hilarious, deeply sad, oddly touching, and endlessly quotable in a way that
only a Don Hertzfeldt film can be.
This article appears in Jan 3-9, 2018.
