'World of Tomorrow:' The Story Behind One of the Year's Most Acclaimed Animated Shorts

A scene from ‘World of Tomorrow’

You may not immediately recognize Don Hertzfeldt’s name, but chances are good that you know his drawings. The Austin-based animator’s deceptively simple, thematically complex, and darkly funny stick-figure short cartoons like The Meaning of Life, Wisdom Teeth and the Oscar-nominated Rejected have made him a favorite with audiences and fellow animators alike. Hertzfeldt’s cult continues to grow with such recent, higher-profile projects as It’s Such a Beautiful Day, an acclaimed 2012 feature film that collects three shorts about a man steadily losing his memories, as well as a popular 2014 “couch gag” for The Simpsons. And at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the director won some of the best reviews of his career— not to mention his second Grand Jury Prize for short film — with World of Tomorrow, a 16-minute tour de force that marks his first experience with digital animation.

Not to worry, though — Hertzfeldt’s signature stick figure aesthetic is very much in effect. So is his melancholic sense of humor, which can have viewers in hysterics one moment and in tears the next. Almost two years in the making, World of Tomorrow follows 4-year-old Emily, who unexpectedly meets a fourth-generation clone of herself from the distant future. Transported through the time stream, Emily is given a tour of what lies ahead for the human race, from the small joys to the inescapable miseries. Available for rental on Vimeo today, World of Tomorrow not only encourages, but demands repeat viewings in order to catch all the subtle jokes and rich ideas that Hertzfeldt is playing with. Yahoo Movies spoke with the filmmaker about casting the perfect 4 year old and whether he hopes World of Tomorrow is his ticket back to the Oscars.  

It’s Such a Beautiful Day ends with a sequence that feels like a prelude to World of Tomorrow — with the character traveling to the distant future. Are the two films connected in your mind?  

I’ve been wanting to do science fiction for a very long time, and I’m surprised it took me this long. It’s probably my favorite genre, and I usually don’t do a lot of genre stuff. I’m just interested in future projections; I have a poster from a ‘30s-era World’s Fair and I love the movie Things to Come, which is just future speculation, and practically non-narrative. There’s not a lot of that around anymore. A lot of futuristic stuff is doom and gloom and apocalypse and it seems less interesting. You can definitely see those interests reaching into It’s Such a Beautiful Day. Another common link is that I’m always interested in memories. When we say we want to live forever, what we really mean is we want to take our memories with us. We don’t want to lose those experiences because those memories make us who we are.

Watch the ‘World of Tomorrow’ trailer: 

And, in fact, the look of World of Tomorrow very much reflects a child’s vision of the future. We’re seeing this extraordinary world through her eyes, and she almost can’t process it in any way except through simple lines and basic geometric shapes.

That was one of my goals, to make it look like a children’s book. The way I draw is very minimal anyways, but this was the first time I made something digitally and I wanted to avoid the look of a lot of 3D films that we’re saturated by. I wanted to make it with minimal pictures and have it be very colorful. It kind of looks like the covers of those old pulpy ‘50s and ‘60s sci-fi magazines or dime store novels, which always had a flat primary color and geometric figures all over the place, and figures running in the foreground holding a ray gun or something.

I have a 4-year-old daughter and listening to Emily was like hearing my own kid speak in animated form. Clearly, you either have a 4 year old yourself or know a 4 year old.

I know a 4 year old! My niece, Winona Mae, voices Emily and she was 4 years old when I originally recorded her. You learn really quickly that you can’t direct a 4 year old. I had some lines I wanted her to say, but it didn’t work — she didn’t want to repeat them to me, or when she did, it sounded forced and weird. You just have to let the 4 year old happen. So I recorded her with my iPad while we just drew pictures together and talked about the world. Then I went through the tapes of these sessions and created the character by editing it and rewriting the story to fit what she said. That was a really great exercise, because I felt it took the pressure off me.

What’s really amazing to me is that I saw her again this last December and she’s 5 now. I thought, “Oh, I’ll record her again,” but she’s completely changed! Now, she’s directing me. She’d be like “I’m a princess, you’re a gorilla and we’re in a monster’s cave.” It made me realize what lightning in a bottle those recordings are from when she was 4 — that brief moment where she’s not too young to not give you full sentences, but she’s still got that childhood wonder, that thing we miss so much [as adults].

Watch his short, ‘The Meaning of Life:’ 

Emily has one line that more or less sums up the whole movie to me, where she spots something that her clone doesn’t see and says, “I saw it, you didn’t see it.” It’s a tossed-off line, but it says so much about a child’s point of view.

Yeah, that was a throwaway line that I put in very late. It really does speak to her character and what we forget when we grow up. When my niece was that age, walking to the park with her took forever! [Laughs] It was just a few blocks, but every few steps she’d stop and say, “Look, flowers!” And I was like, “Oh yeah, flowers.” You realize that all of this is new to her, and it’s amazing—all this beauty we’re constantly ignoring.

One distinctive feature of your work is the attention you pay to the way your figures morph and change, especially in a short like The Meaning of Life. They start from basic designs, but then evolve in fascinating ways.

That’s the gift of animation — you can do things like that. I feel I had the most fun with that on The Simpsons piece actually. I had always been interested in the fact that the characters never age. But they have evolved — if you look at the Simpsons from The Tracey Ullman Show, they look radically different than they do today. When I was thinking about my own piece I thought about how they keep evolving. What if the show just never stops? So I projected into the future when all of the talent is long dead and the show is just this awful bootlegged version of itself, and suddenly the Simpsons are these squid creatures.

Watch Hertzfeldt’s ‘Simpson’ couch gag from 2014:

In the past, you’ve released your work through a touring anthology series like The Animation Show. With World of Tomorrow, you’re self-distributing through VOD. What brought about that choice?  

The market — if you can call it that — for indie animated films or short films in general is really what we make of it. It’s almost empowering because there are no rules, we’re just kind of feeling it out as we go. I love seeing these films on the big screen, but we can get it online that much faster, and I didn’t want people to have to wait. It’s going to be an interesting experiment to see how this performs. When we were doing The Animation Show 10 years ago, it was hard to get people to support it. If Mike Judge or Bill Plympton were there, we’d have no trouble selling out, but the regular screenings were always competing with the Internet. If this film doesn’t do well on VOD, we’ll try something else next time.

Watch the Oscar-winning short ‘Rejected:’ 

You received your first short film Oscar nomination in 2001 for Rejected. Do you hope to see World of Tomorrow recognized in a similar way?

It’s something you can’t plan for or even think about. I’ve actually been a member of that branch since 2002. I went to vote as often as I could when I lived in L.A., and I have no idea what these people like. [Laughs] I don’t mean that in a negative way: They’re just impossible to predict. There’ll be these amazing pieces that I fall in love with that nobody else there likes, and then they’ll vote for things that I don’t care for. But sometimes we’re in sync and there are things I agree with that get through to the nominations. It almost feels like throwing darts. The one thing I’ve learned doing this for 20 years is that awards are all publicity, and it’s wonderful publicity.