Don Hertzfeldt’s 2016 Oscar-nominated short World of Tomorrow is now available to stream for free on Youtube, and the internet is all the better for it.
Hertzfeldt has long been one of the internet’s favorite animators, and it feels right that World of Tomorrow has arrived on the world wide web alongside fellow Oscar nominee Rejected, a film that helped define the modern use of the word viral regarding popular internet content.
World of Tomorrow utilizes Hertzfeldt’s iconic ultra-minimalist design style, but offers more sophisticated digitally-created backgrounds and a more elaborate narrative structure. A time-traveling sci-fi tale, World of Tomorrow turns on a clone from the future who projects her consciousness back to our own time to speak with the young girl, Emily, from whom her line was cloned. Future Emily then pulls Emily Prime into her time and shows her what the world of tomorrow is like for the people who live in it.