Emily, a cheerful toddler, receives a video call from her third-generation clone, Emily Prime, who lives 227 years in the future. Emily Prime takes the original Emily on a tour of the future — a world of memory harvesting, consciousness uploading, and the slow heat death of the sun — while the toddler responds with the blissful incomprehension of a child who doesn’t yet know what loss means.
Editorial Perspective
Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow packs more ideas into 17 minutes than most science fiction franchises manage across entire trilogies. The contrast between Emily Prime’s melancholic monologues about love and mortality and toddler Emily’s joyful non sequiturs creates a dynamic that is simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking. Hertzfeldt’s stick-figure aesthetic — deceptively simple against kaleidoscopic digital backgrounds — proves that animation doesn’t need photorealism to achieve emotional truth.
Where to Watch
Available on Vimeo On Demand. Two sequels — World of Tomorrow Episode Two and Episode Three — continue the series.
Historical data reconstructed from archive.org snapshots of the Manhattan Short Film Festival website.
