World of Tomorrow.
World of Tomorrow is an animated sci-fi short film series from filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt. In the broadest possible terms, it follows a young girl named Emily who, later in life, is cloned many times and has her clones visit her younger self through time travel. The clones tell Emily stories of the future while she reflects on the present and things veer toward the mind-blowingly profound while also being funny, scary, heartfelt, and everything in between. Hertzfeldt not only writes and directs the shorts, but animates them, edits them and more, all by himself. Each film is a staggering achievement, and he’s just getting started.
Every year,
Annie Awards does what the Golden Globes, the Oscars, and all the other big awarding bodies cannot: properly celebrate the best of animation. And this year, the ASIFA-Hollywood’s annual animation awards did their job right, doling out the most nominations to two of the best movies of the year: Pixar’s singular
Soul and Cartoon Saloon’s hand-drawn masterpiece
Wolfwalkers. But which one will deservedly walk away with the most prizes? We’ll have to find out when the 48th Annie Awards are streamed live on
April 16, 2021.
Soul and
Wolfwalkers both dominated the 2021 Annie Awards nominations, leading the pack with 10 nods each. They’re both expected to win their respective feature and best independent feature categories, but are nose-to-nose when it comes to direction, FX, character animation, character design, production design, score, storyboarding, and writing. But each has one nomination for a category the other does not
“
Thank you for the days / those endless days, those sacred days you gave me” So begins the classic 1968 single by the Kinks, and Tsai Ming-Liang has an apposite poster tagline here if he needs it. But altering any one element of this immaculate comeback feature––say, putting this very track against the closing credits––would be heresy, especially when it already contains a beautiful use of diegetic music in the theme from Chaplin’s
Limelight. I was lucky enough to see his tender, spellbinding new film at BFI London’s in-person, distanced screenings, and strongly hope others are afforded that pleasure when things open again in 2021––when it will most certainly appear on TFS’s list for the second year running. –
â¶ï¸Â All three episodes of
World of Tomorrow are available to rent or buy (via Vimeo) at bitterfilms.com.
By now, Don Hertzfeldtâs hapless cartoon stick figures are as distinctive a motif as Mark Rothkoâs block panels, e e cummingsâs lower-case poetry or Buster Keatonâs stone face; 25 years into his career, the Austin, Texas-based independent is animationâs laureate of mock-naive existential gallows humour and wonder. If his most plain-drawn student movies â Ah, LâAmour (1995), Genre (1996), Lily and Jim (1997), Billyâs Balloon (1998), mostly available on Hertzfeldtâs YouTube channel â led on the slapstick cruelty their maker could inflict on their twig figures, Hertzfeldt delighting in the power of his creative hand, his maturing works have opened up vistas of pathos and puzzlement around those long-suffering ciphers, at the same time as he embedded them in richer worlds of analogue animation technique.