A version this article also appeared at Medium.
Don Hertzfeldt’s Rejected Cartoons, or Rejected as it’s known, was a staple of my early college days. Absurd phrases like “My spoon is too big!” and “My anus is bleeding!” were shouted by attention-grabbing freshmen all over campus. Rejected introduced the world to the animator Don Hertzfeldt. Hertzfeldt’s absurd animated studies in humor feature simple stick figures and bombastic classical music. His work influenced by subversive classics, everything from Looney Tunes, Ren and Stimpy and Doug to David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick. As much as I adored Rejected, it put me in a category of folks who misjudged Hertzfeldt as an adolescent one hit wonder who was probably just trying to do the clever satire and crude animation technique of South Park.
Thankfully, we were all proven wrong. Not only has Hertzfeldt’s body of work, which mostly consists of animated shorts, grown into such humorous, witty, and utterly disturbing pieces as Billy’s Balloon and Wisdom Teeth, but he also animated the opening gag of an episode of The Simpsons, has been twice nominated for Oscars, and with works like It’s Such a Beautiful Day and World of Tomorrow, he has proven that he actually has something to say. Never have stick figures been more effecting and never has absurdity been more relatable and accessible.
Hertzfeldt’s first feature-length animated film, 2011’s It’s Such a Beautiful Day, explores the life and death anxieties of a brain cancer diagnosis. It was a critical hit and won numerous awards on the festival circuit.
His latest is the Oscar nominated short, World of Tomorrow, which deals with the existential exploration of the self and the world in relationship to change (that dirty bastard) and technology. World of Tomorrow does effectively in fifteen minutes what took Kubrick, Bergman, Malick, and von Trier an entire lifetime of feature-length films to do — he describes the the human relationship to all time and space.
World of Tomorrow is not, however, a typical sci-fi piece. If it were, the protagonist would be an adult or teen facing an extraordinary existential crisis. Hertzfeldt instead casts as our protagonist a four-year-old girl named Emily. Hertzfeldt’s study of Emily, much like his animation style, is unembellished and direct: what you see is what you get. Hertzfeldt understands that this is what is so fascinating, adorable, and jarring about little children. They are the most sincere and, in a rather Zen way, the most present of human beings.
In Hertzfeldt’s universe, our memories are uploaded into specific programs that are then transported from clone to clone throughout all of time and history. One of Emily’s adult clones, also named Emily, has encountered Emily Prime, our four-year-old heroine, in a time-travelling Skype-like encounter. This adult Emily has traveled the expanse of Earth, space, and time, and has come back to Emily Prime’s present reality to describe to her what she will experience and that she shouldn’t be alarmed. While Adult Emily uses technical jargon and philosophical terminology to explain the human condition, all Emily Prime can respond with is what she had for lunch that day.
The best moments in World of Tomorrow occur when Adult Emily leads Emily Prime on a space-time odyssey full of colors and shapes that evoke Kubrick’s Jupiter Space sequence in 2001: a space odyssey. My favorite moment is when Emily Prime sees a vibrant shade of pink shoot across the screen and she exclaims with pride and glee, “That’s a pink one!
What Hertzfeldt has done most importantly is take Adult Emily’s very serious narrative of “where we are headed” and hold it up against Emily Prime’s very joyful narrative of “where we are.” We walk away asking, is it possible that the four-year-old has a better grasp on what it means to be fully human in this ever changing, shifting, breaking world than the successful, ‘well-adjusted’ adult? I certainly think so.
I finished Hertzfeldt’s newest animated piece and felt grateful. Films that evoke a deep sense of gratitude are some of the best you can encounter. So, before the Oscars air this Sunday, the 28th of February, see Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow (it’s currently streaming on Netflix). You might walk away with a sense of gratitude, awe, wonder, and “childlike faith” that, it turns out, we need to survive the cruelty of our world.
Josiah Richard Armstrong is a hospital chaplain from Western New York. He is also a playwright and amateur cartoonist. Follow him on Twitter @JosiahArmstrong and Medium, where he writes more reviews for film and television.
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