Don Hertzfeldt - World Of Tomorrow (2015)

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A cartoon about a clone from the future may be 2015’s best film    by Noel Murray   

Throughout this year’s Sundance Film Festival, whenever I’d run into my fellow critics, we’d go through the usual ritual exchange of, “What have you liked so far?” Passing movie titles back and forth, more often than I could count, the conversation would end with one or both of us saying, “Of course, the best thing I’ve seen is that Don Hertzfeldt cartoon, ‘World Of Tomorrow.’ I don’t expect anything to top it.”

Can an animated short be the best film at a festival? Or the best of the year? Because although “World Of Tomorrow” is only 15 minutes long, it’s as funny, imaginative, and heartbreaking as anything released so far in 2015, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I could make that same claim on December 31. At Sundance, where I had a link to an online screener, I watched “World Of Tomorrow” nearly every night before I went to sleep, as a pre-bedtime devotional. I’ve done the same a few times since Hertzfeldt recently made the film available as a 30-day rental via Vimeo. For me, the brevity of “World Of Tomorrow” isn’t a stumbling block, it’s a virtue. How often is a movie this outstanding also so concise that it can be watched at least once a day?

“World Of Tomorrow” is about two Emilys. The first, Emily Prime, is a toddler from our near future, who at the start of the film answers a call on an elaborate videophone/computer console. The woman contacting her is a third-generation version of herself—call her Emily 3G—created via a soon-to-be-popular cloning process in which people spawn their own doubles and then upload their memories into them, in an attempt to live forever. But 227 years from when Emily Prime answers the phone, the world is about to end, so Emily 3G contacts her original self to tell her about what her life is going to be like for the next couple of centuries.

Hertzfeldt has said that “World Of Tomorrow” was inspired in part by those old science magazines and short subjects that predicted what the decades to come would be, after we’d developed flying cars and food pills. In Hertzfeldt’s future, humanity is obsessed with preservation and nostalgia. Those who can’t clone themselves store their memories in digital cubes, or allow their dead faces to be stretched over animatronic machines so that they can still be a part of their loved ones’ lives. And since robots do most of the work, the citizens of this new clone-dominated culture spend most of their time accessing old memories, as part of an effort to understand what it means to be human. In recent years, Emily 3G explains, most people’s memories are of themselves staring at screens.

That image of infinite regression—clones watching clones watching clones—is a good starting point for understanding what’s so special about “World Of Tomorrow.” Most importantly, it’s humorous. I don’t want to kill the comedy through over-explanation, but the shot of people remembering themselves remembering themselves remembering memories works because of the blank expressions, coupled with the whole idea of screens within screens. It’s also a sad image, with the figure becoming less animated (and literally bluer) the further it recedes from the original memory. And the picture is aesthetically pleasing, adding layers of lines and shapes that drift through, giving the frame a depth that disguises the overall flatness of the characters and the setting. This goes on throughout the short: There’s nearly always something in motion around the two Emilys, who themselves remain mostly static.

This has been the trend in Hertzfeldt’s work, toward more visual density. The animator first drew attention with the stick-figures and sick jokes in cartoons like 1998’s “Billy’s Balloon” and 2000’s “Rejected,” but over the past decade he’s been mixing minimalism with bursts of eye-popping abstraction, in service of complex explorations of human existence. (The full scope of Hertzfeldt’s ambition is most evident in his triptych feature It’s Such A Beautiful Day, which The A.V. Club named the eighth-best film of 2012.)
In “World Of Tomorrow,” Hertzfeldt opens with a black-and-white side-view of the videophone that looks like nothing more than a random (and somewhat rude) assortment of lines and curves. Soon though, the screen becomes a riot of color and symbols—as though it were a window into a future that our early 21st century brains can barely understand.
Even if there were nothing to “World Of Tomorrow” but Hertzfeldt’s art, it’d still be a delight. Pause the film at random and there’s nearly always something pretty to see, whether it’s the contrast of thick-lined characters and yellowish haze when Emily 3G warns against “getting lost in memory”…

… or the squiggly, light-sensitive robots that Emily 3G once supervised on the moon…

… or the projections on the wall of the “memory gallery” that Emily 3G opens later in her life.

What really brings these pictures to life though is how the visitor from the future puts them into the context of her personal biography. Julia Pott, the voice of Emily 3G, maintains a careful monotone as she describes the extreme social stratification and continued blurring of the lines between technology and biology in her time. She casually drops lines like, “We are all doomed, Emily Prime,” and explains the dangers of time travel—which she pronounces as one strangely accented word: “timeTRAVel”—and then immediately pulls her ancestor into her era, without a second thought toward whether she might kill her in the process.

Then she tells the little girl about her life as a copy of a copy of a copy, cursed with a deteriorating understanding of why she exists. A lot of Emily 3G’s story revolves around all the times she thought she was in love: with a sparkly rock, a fuel pump, a space-monster named Simon, and finally with her husband, an aged clone related to an organic art exhibit she’d enjoyed as a youngster. She explains that when her husband died, she had “no capacity” to deal with it, and that she now mostly just sits quietly and feels bad. “I am very proud of my sadness,” Emily 3G adds, “Because it means I am more alive.” It’s a touching moment—but then it’s also astonishing how much emotion Hertzfeldt is able
to wring out of these little stick-people, just through the slightest tilt of the head or by forming a lovely pattern just behind them.
All of the above makes “World Of Tomorrow” sound heavy, which the film definitely can be. But it’s also frequently hilarious, and cute. Emily 3G’s deadpan adds some dry wit to the scene when she recalls the first messages her grandfather sent after he was uploaded into a digital cube (“Oh. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. Oh my God. Holy mother of God. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh God.”) or when she recites some of the poetry written by her abandoned moon-robots (“The light is life. Robot must move. Move robot move. But why? Move move move. Robot forever move.”) It’s also unbelievably adorable every time Emily 3G tries to impart mind-blowing information to this confused-but-friendly little kid (voiced by Hertzfeldt’s equally oblivious niece Winona Mae), who responds with questions like, “Do you like my cars?”

The Burns and Allen dynamic between the two Emilys reinforces one of the major themes of the film: the constant push and pull between mankind’s reckless, youthful spirit and our cold, queasy rationality. (“Now is the envy of all of the dead,” Emily 3G tells Emily Prime. “Okay,” the little girl chirps.) Even the visual design and animation makes that point. Emily Prime comes bouncing into the picture, pigtails flopping, while Emily 3G stares straight ahead, her hair thin and flat. And when Emily Prime becomes overwhelmed by what Emily 3G is telling her, she puts her head down on the computer console, looking like a wild, uncontrolled element spilling across a technological marvel.

Yet even though Emily 3G seems disconnected from her past self, by the end of “World Of Tomorrow” it’s clear that she feels a pang of envy at how casual and carefree Emily Prime is. “It is a sad life, and a long life,” she warns. “You will feel a deep longing for something you cannot remember.” Emily 3G says this right after she finishes what she set out to do: extracting a memory from Emily Prime (of her and her mother taking a walk) to use as a comfort during the impending apocalypse. After hundreds of years of extending life and acquiring knowledge, in the end what we all may really want someday is to get back what we had when we were 3.

It’s hard to talk about the overall “World Of Tomorrow” experience without getting into the ending, so forgive the following spoiler. (Or, better yet, pony up the $3.99, rent the short, and then come back and read the rest of this.) Throughout the film, Emily 3G’s callousness is worrisome, as she talks about all the thinking, feeling entities that she’s left behind over the years on her personal journey. So inevitably, when she’s done with Emily Prime, she sends her back into the past but overshoots the mark, seemingly stranding her in a snowy prehistoric landscape. Hertzfeldt holds on that scene for a few uncomfortable seconds, letting the music swell as though the credits are about to roll. Then he pops Emily Prime back into her home, without explanation.
Logically, this is what has to happen, because otherwise there’d be no Emily 3G and no movie. But I like to see this ending as a moment of divine intervention from Hertzfeldt, granting a reprieve to a character too sweet to kill. “World Of Tomorrow” is dark at times, and deeply concerned with the meaning of life, but one of the main reasons why I’ve watched it so many times—and plan to watch it so many more—is that it stares into the void and then cheerily shrugs. “What a happy day it is,” Emily Prime says as she skips out of sight. And for a moment anyway, that’s so true.

-    www.avclub.com/article/cartoon-about-clone-future-may-be-2015s-best-film-217741

Can you name a short film off the top of your head? Something you’d identify as a short film — you know: a film, but shorter. Not a YouTube video, not a skit. A short film.
If you can’t, that’s all right. Short films have long occupied a place in the moviemaking business similar to what short stories are for writers: They’re a way to hone your skills before you attempt the big project. But in the literary world, many writers will remain short-story specialists throughout their careers, even if the form is not generally as lucrative or as popular as the novel. Very few filmmakers, on the other hand, keep on making shorts. Short films are practice — they’re rehearsal.
Forget all of that and watch World of Tomorrow, an animated piece by Don Hertzfeldt that won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Short at Sundance.
Only 16 minutes long, and available to rent on Vimeo, World of Tomorrow is about a clone who comes back from the future to visit her young original self, and to describe the loves — ranging from human to mineral — that will define that child’s soon-to-end life. If that seems absurd, don’t worry: It is. But it’s all rendered so beautifully, on both a visual and emotional level, that by the end of the short, you’ll wonder less why it’s all happening and more what this means for the development of this little girl, a barely vocal sprite, who’s just been burdened with the very adult knowledge of death and heartbreak and need.
Aside from the fact that it might make you cry, World of Tomorrow — which is done in a style you could call avant-Flash; it looks a little like the games you used to play while you were bored in Psych 101, except a thousand times more wonderful — has an impact of a different sort. If a short can suture this much visual poetry into the fabric of a quarter-hour, then the medium must be underrated. That’s efficiency. And it suggests an idyllic future: What if you could get the satisfaction of a feature film in less time than it takes you to rewatch a Gilmore Girls episode for the fifth time?
Obviously, that’s a thought experiment; most filmmakers make features because most filmmakers are not Don Hertzfeldt: It isn’t easy to fit two hours of emotion into 20 minutes. But the point still stands: This is a viable entertainment that we’re severely underemploying. Why is that? Based on the way we consume media now, we should be in the Age of the Short.
Every day, YouTube’s billion users worldwide watch hundreds of millions of hours of video. The range of what they’re watching is the breadth of human existence — I still think regularly about this great Jake Swearingen piece touching on YouTube as the Panopticon — and while art might be only a small part of that breadth, it’s there. Among all the sloth videos and Worldstar fights and confessionals, there’s room for fictionalized entertainment, and not just comedy, which has already landed because it shares well and doesn’t require a full narrative or thematic gist.
The best example of this point might be High Maintenance. Vimeo will suggest that High Maintenance is a television show, because television shows are lucrative and having a television show is prestigious, but High Maintenance is much more a collection of short films than it is an episodic series. Each piece is self-contained and autonomous, with a firm beginning, middle, and end, and while they all exist inside the same world, united by main character The Guy, the overlap is an enhancement, not a necessity.

High Maintenance has an audience in the six figures. A significant part of this has to do with the fact that High Maintenance is great, thoughtful and sweet and never glib, a truly sincere piece of work in an aggressively insincere world. Another part, though, comes from the thrill of the reset. With each episode, you have no idea what you’re in for, and that fresh beginning helps establish each character as the protagonist in his or her own world — which, of course, we all are to ourselves. Plus, you can watch each one in 15 minutes or less. It’s consumption tailored nicely to a laptop beside your cutting board or an iPad screen in bed.
Like High Maintenance’s, Hertzfeldt’s success is significantly tied to the passion of his fans, who have patronized his work in the intimate way an off-mainstream artist requires to survive in 2015. But that work deserves a wider audience, and World of Tomorrow should be the catalyst — with its coexistent wonder and darkness, bringing to mind David Lynch and Hayao Miyazaki, this is art that has a place in a tradition of entertainment, not some abstract experiment bound for MoMA. And it takes only 15 minutes. Although, fair warning: You’ll be thinking about it for longer than that.
- Kevin Lincoln    grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/world-of-tomorrow-and-short-film-in-the-youtube-era/

Over the past decade and change, Don Hertzfeldt has quietly, tirelessly asserted himself as America’s most insatiably imaginative animator. Ever since his breakout effort, 2000’s “Rejected,” earned him a Best Animated Short Film Oscar nomination, Hertzfeldt has been quietly producing breathtaking shorts. Three of those small wonders, all starring a profoundly human stick figure named Bill, form Hertzfeldt’s 62-minute “It’s Such A Beautiful Day,” which is currently amassing cult adoration via Netflix’s instant-streaming library. His newest film, the mind-expanding existentialist 17-minute thought experiment “World Of Tomorrow,” has methodically gathered ecstatic raves as it’s moved from festival to festival. Fresh off a win in the Animated Short category at South By Southwest, Hertzfeldt answered some questions via email.
The Dissolve: “It’s Such A Beautiful Day” leaves a huge emotional impact. Do fans of your work ever share how Bill’s anxieties and melancholy resonated with them? 
Don Hertzfeldt: Yes, all the time. And I do love hearing about it. But it emphasizes something I’ve always felt strange about: still thinking of a film as “mine” after it’s finished. “It’s Such A Beautiful Day” is long out of theaters, and the DVD is out there, and all of its other day-to-day needs are long ago taken care of. So it’s long been off my radar of daily chores, and with Netflix and iTunes and the DVDs and wherever else it’s living now, it’s pretty much become totally autonomous. Even when it was in theaters, we never had a publicist or an ad campaign, for a bunch of reasons. It was purely a word-of-mouth movie. And when people get in touch after seeing it, sometimes with very personal things, it’s wonderful, but I can’t help but feel one step removed from it all. A movie like that is this autonomous extension of yourself making sometimes deeply personal relationships out there, by itself, with strangers, people you will never meet: a weird Don-bot saying hello to millions of people on your behalf, in their personal spaces, things you will never know about unless they contact you. I raised it, but it’s moved out. So it often feels like if someone tells you, “Oh hey, your son saved me from drowning last week.” You would smile and think, “Oh, cool. Yeah, he’s a good kid.”
The Dissolve: Your couch gag on The Simpsons was your highest-exposure project yet. Did it open more viewers up to your work?
Hertzfeldt: Well, I guess it must be true in theory? I have no idea. They say something like 8.5 million people watched that season première, but I’m sure the vast majority of them probably just felt like they experienced a mild seizure for those opening two minutes, and then maybe forgot about it. I guess we’ll be testing the theory when we see how “World Of Tomorrow” performs online. This will be the first time I’m releasing a piece online, without the usual long theatrical run, DVD, etc. Whether it sinks or swims is really going to dictate whether I try something like it again.
The Dissolve: “World Of Tomorrow” is your first film to use digital animation technology instead of analog methods. Did the story you wanted to tell compel you to explore new technologies?
Hertzfeldt: I wanted to learn some digital animation here at home while getting ready for the next feature film. In almost 20 years of animation, I’d never even drawn anything on a tablet before. So I wanted to make something fast and furious to learn the ropes, and science fiction was the perfect playground for that. “Don finally makes something digital: the future!” Then The Simpsons got in touch only two weeks after I started “World Of Tomorrow.” The Simpsons piece needed to be digital as well, and it made sense to work on the two at the same time.
The Dissolve: “World Of Tomorrow” embraces genre—in this case, science fiction—more directly than any of your earlier films. What about SF in particular attracted you? Should we expect forays into other genres in the future?
Hertzfeldt: I’ve wanted to do science fiction for years. I’m actually surprised it took me this long. It’s my favorite genre, but I have trouble with genre sometimes, because it always seems to mean having to tread at least a little bit through overly familiar waters. It’s hard to make a horror movie that feels fresh and surprising after the audience has seen 10,000 of them before. So familiarity is going to haunt you in any genre—but “World Of Tomorrow” is so ridiculous, it’s more or less a parody.

I’ve always loved the covers of old pulpy sci-fi novels and magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, those clean and modern designs: There’d often be a strong solid color, a bunch of mysterious geometric shapes, and then your main characters sort of running in the foreground. That’s pretty much where the Outernet in “World Of Tomorrow” got its look. I also wanted the film to look like a children’s book, very saturated and flat. I think you can also see some science-fiction thoughts starting to leak into the end of “It’s Such A Beautiful Day,” and after that, I did a graphic novel called The End Of The World, which was sort of like if science fiction had a really bad dream—and the book shares a few ideas with “World Of Tomorrow.” So it’s been a few years of this long sci-fi thread already. There might be a bit more coming.
The Dissolve: You mine a surprising number of laughs from the subject of death in “World Of Tomorrow.” Do you find comfort in teasing out the humor from bleak situations? 
Hertzfeldt: I don’t know if it’s comforting, so much as it’s necessary for our mental survival. If we can’t laugh in the face of some horrible tragedy that is happening to us, there is really nothing left. For some reason, I’m kind of attracted to survival stories. I have shelves full of them. And even in the darkest situations, people in concentration camps, people starving on a glacier, whatever it is, you always find them retaining a sense of humor about it.
The Dissolve: Care to hazard a guess as to what happens after we die?
Hertzfeldt: Ha! Wow. Well… we’ve all been dead before, right? Until really recently, we’ve all been dead for the entire history of the universe. How mind-blowing is that? We’re already so incredibly, impossibly lucky to be even here at all. Every day is a giant cosmic miracle. Yet so many people want more: “There has to be something else, there has to be something afterward.” But don’t we already know what death is like? Isn’t death exactly like your memories of the year 1750?
The Dissolve: One line in particular stuck out to me. Emily says, “I am very proud of my sadness, because it means I am more alive.” Could you speak to that? Is depression the cost of being really, truly alive?
Hertzfeldt: No, depression is not the cost of being alive, any more than joy is the cost of being alive. Being alive means experiencing all these things. Life is the good and the bad and everything else. Sadness and depression, at the very least, are there to make us appreciate the happier times when they come around again. Having gone through any great sadness in a life seems to make people more interesting in general. They’re more grateful, more thoughtful. People who are weirdly happy all the time, like a little dog—don’t trust them. I’ve always liked that quote, “The more sadness is carved into your soul, the more joy you can contain.” [This is a paraphrase of a Kahlil Gibran quote from The Prophet. —ed.] Anyway, so Emily is figuring out her emotions and learning how to be more human, and for her, feeling sadness is better than feeling nothing.
The Dissolve: “World Of Tomorrow” will have a full release On Demand, another first for you. Was this a deliberate choice? Have you had any frustrations or difficulties with distribution that led you to turn to On Demand?
Hertzfeldt: No, no frustrations. I just want people so see it as soon as possible, and the fact that this one’s digital makes On Demand that much easier. With a 35mm movie, there’s a ton of lab work that has to be done to get the digital copy just right. So before, it made sense to parade the films through theaters for a longer time, where they looked better anyway, until the DVD or whatever was ready. “World Of Tomorrow” will be in theaters all year as well. It’s already headed to a couple hundred film festivals. The DCP looks beautiful, and we’ll send it to any cinema that wants it. But now that can happen more simultaneously.

The Dissolve: For your next feature, “Antarctica,” you’re bringing on a team of additional animators for the first time. Has expanding your workforce let you do things that might be undoable solo?
Hertzfeldt: Yes! Pretty much every single thing in “Antarctica,” aside from the script, I guess, would be completely undoable for me solo.
The Dissolve: Could you single out a highlight moment for the “World Of Tomorrow” production process?
Hertzfeldt: My niece, Winona, contributes the voice of little Emily. She was 4 when I recorded her. You can’t direct a 4-year-old, I learned that really fast. I couldn’t even get her to repeat lines for me. So I just recorded audio as we drew pictures together, played with stuff, talked about the world. I was pretty aware that if the recordings produced nothing, the film would have been dead before it even began. She lives in Scotland and I am in Austin, so I usually only get to see her about once a year. After a weeklong visit, recording five minutes here and there, I had about an hour or so of total recorded time with her. So the first step was finding all of her best reactions and questions, and I began to figure out what her character could be talking about here, or looking at there. And with that side of the conversation, I was then able to rewrite Julia’s opposite lines, and rewrite a bit of the story to make everything fit. So the highlight for me was seeing Emily animated for the first time with Winona’s voice coming out of her, and seamlessly interacting with Julia’s character. When you’re aware that it’s all coming out of very rough, lighting-in-a-bottle recordings, just whatever was in her head at the time, it’s really kind of a weird magic to see onscreen. - Charles Bramesco 

thedissolve.com/features/interview/980-animator-don-hertzfeldt-on-not-trusting-happy-peop/

After looking into one’s past with the profound animation It’s Such a Beautiful Day, Don Hertzfeldt headed to the future for his next project, a short film marking his work in three years. World of Tomorrow, now available on VOD, is an exceedingly brilliant odyssey into the outer reaches of a future universe that channels our inner anxieties of loneliness. The story concerns Emily (Winona Mae), a young girl, who meets her future self in the variety of an adult clone (Julie Pott), as the latter guides us through the bleak destiny that lies ahead. Bursting with creativity and hilarity, it’s at once a hilarious and deeply affecting piece of work, deserving of its top awards at both Sundance and SXSW.I got the opportunity to speak with Hertzfeldt ahead of the release of the short and we discussed his first foray into digital animation and how it fit within his story, working on multiple projects at once, collaborating with his niece for voice acting, the current state of independent animation, a potential sequel, what’s in store next for the director, digital distribution, and much more. Check out the full conversation below.
The Film Stage: Congrats on the movie. It was actually the last film I watched at Sundance and it was the best one there I saw.

Don Hertzfeldt: Oh, right on. Thanks. I didn’t know you saw it at the big theater in Park City.
Well, I actually got a screener of it, and so I watched it right before I was leaving. I turned off all the lights and a few other journalists watched it and we all loved it. So it was a great way to go out.
Oh, cool.
So, you’ve been animating for almost two decades now, but this is your first foray into digital animation. Did that feel like a new challenge, like you were almost animating for the first time?
Yeah, I guess you can say that. You know, the best way I’ve been able to compare it is it was like trying to read a children’s book that’s in another language. It seems very basic, like you should know this stuff, but the vocabulary’s all changed and things are in different places. It was interesting; I have a lot of animator friends who can’t stand drawing on tablets. There’s a certain tension when you draw on a piece of paper. It’s not very smooth, like drawing on glass, and to them the tablet is just way too slick. But I never had that trouble for whatever reason. I really took to it quickly. And there was a learning curve for two frustrating weeks and then I kind of got used to it, and then I really appreciated the speed of it. Just being able to power through these shots much, much quicker than I’ve ever been able to do before and I really appreciated that because film is beautiful, but it takes time, and there’s processing, and the paper, and working with camera, it’s just I’m not that young anymore. [Laughs]
I appreciated being able to power through a shot a day. It got to the point where it was almost addictive and if I didn’t get through a shot a day, I would start to get sad, because I didn’t want to fuss over this film. I didn’t storyboard anything. Digital was my excuse to try everything differently and with this one it was going to be no fussing, no storyboards. Let’s just everyday look at the script. Okay, they’re on the moon. Okay, what’s that gonna look like? I just design everything from the ground up that way, and it was interesting,. It was different, it was fast. Primarily fast. [Laughs]
The story obviously takes place in the future. Do you think that the themes and plot of the film help with that digital transition? If it was a more standard Earth-set story, do you think you might not have used digital or were you going to use digital no matter what for your next project?
That’s a good point. I think it was necessary to the look for the film to go digital. It’s not something I could have done on film, just like It’s Such a Beautiful Day’s story would not have been told the same way digitally. There’s certain effects in that story that are impossible, or would have been impossible to do digitally. So, yeah, I kind of have to go with what format supports the story you’re selling and for this it just made perfect sense to do something about the future. Here’s a guy who’s been living with film and paper for so many years, the last person still shooting animation on film, to take the plunge into this future, as well. And the fact that it’s a satire I think I was able to get away with a lot more. And The Simpsons called the same time, like two weeks after I started World of Tomorrow and I just had the future on the brain, I think. It just made sense to share some of the same blood in those veins, as well.

You said it took about a day to do a shot, so I was curious how many days did it actually end up taking for the whole thing? And did The Simpsons set your course off?
I think World of Tomorrow took about nine months, but I was doing The Simpsons at the same time, which took three or four months. So, it’s hard to say exactly to a scientific point. It was really good for me to work on more than one thing at the same time and learning that as I get older it’s really the best way that I work with juggling more than one project. It’s easier to finish one and leap right onto the next one while your brain is still in that mode. If you finish a project and you allow the creative muscle or whatever it is in your head to relax, the engine slows down, and time goes by, it’s that much harder start a new project. You need to get revved up again and kind of get in the groove. For so many years now I’ve kinda just bounced from one to the next project and lately I’m doing more than one at a time. I think it’s actually enriching all of them. There was a second part of your question, I think I forgot it already.
Ah, you answered it — just the timeline of the two projects.
Yeah, they were pretty side by side. The recording obviously came first, recording my niece [Winona Mae, who voices Emily Prime] and recording Julia Pott‘s [voice of Emily] lines opposite that.
Is there a lot of stuff in the cutting room with your niece? Did you have any guidence for her or kinda just let her go?
I had to let her go. I was naive to think in the beginning that I could direct a four-year-old –
[Both laugh]
– which is really just not possible. It’s like trying to herd cats. So I eventually surrendered to just recording her, being herself, and I just got an app for my iPad that could record her quietly, so I didn’t want anything too intrusive. She was in Scotland and I don’t know if you can tell, she has a little Scottish accent, and I live in Austin, so we only get to see each other maybe once a year and our recording window is really, really limited. So that was the first step and I think the key to the whole movie because I knew I needed a little girl voice. I didn’t want to fake it and if I didn’t get anything out of each session, there was no point in trying to make this thing. So we just hung out and drew pictures and played with Play-Doh and talked about the world, and her being herself and from this little set of recordings I went through and said, ‘Okay, she’s reacting to something here. What is she looking at? What is she talking about here?’ And I rewrote the story to make it all fit and I rewrote Julia’s lines, the other half of the conversation, so it would all be more seamless.
There was quite a few lines on the cutting room floor, so to speak. Just dialogue, of course. I may still find a home for it, I don’t know. I realize now that she’s five what lightning in a bottle those recordings were. Because she’s totally changed now. And this film would have been impossible to make now because then at four it’s sort of this reactions period in development. She’s looking at things, she’s asking questions. When we would walk to the park, even though the park is only a few blocks away, it would take ages. Because she would stop every few steps and say, ‘Look, flower’, and, ‘Yeah, flower.’ And we keep going. ‘Look, a car.’ ‘Yeah, it’s a car.’ And you realize, yeah, this is all new to you. This is amazing, you’re taking it all in the first time. This is so beautiful, why can’t we all see the world like this? And now that she’s five, she’s directing me now. Now she’s like, ‘Okay, I’m a princess. You’re a gorilla. We live in this ice cave and we have to go save magical rabbits from the blah blah,’ and it’s completely changed. I’m really glad now I have that set of her in that period because I’m sure when she’s a teenager she’ll be mortified by this. [Laughs] Hopefully when’s she’s older she’ll appreciate that we did this and it’s kinda a neat little artifact.

So the sequel for this movie will be vastly different is what you’re saying?
[Laughs] I’ve been circling it, you know. We’ll see, it would be great to keep revisiting. I have no idea. I just never thought of it that way but it’s not too crazy to think about.
Interesting, that’d be great. I’d love to see more of this world. Doing sci-fi here, is there any direct inspirations, either you had before making this film or just growing up?
I think the main thing directly for this film was, visually, I love the old, 50′s and 60′s sci-fi magazines and anthologies and dime store novels, I love the cover art. I love the very modern illustrations. You usually see a bold primary color and then these sharp geometric shapes that’s implying something and then in front of it all are your heroes. And they’re running from something with like a ray-gun or something. I’ve always loved the bold modern designs of the 50′s when it seemed like everything looks better designed than today. You know, a cereal box. So those covers were the direct inspiration for the look, more just these extra geometric shapes moving all these directions, and colors. I wanted the film to really, really explode with color, color, color. We made sixteen different drafts of the DCP that you screen in theaters over and over, just to get more and more color and density out of it.
That’s great.
Yeah, and overall also tied into that, I wanted it to look like a children’s book. I wanted it to look very flat, minimal textures, and again color. Because we’re seeing this from her point-of-view, and I kinda wanted to run away from a lot of the other pitfalls that you see in a lot of digital animation today, which is sort of running towards photorealism and so many textures. It’s almost getting a little boring. You know, I wanted to try something different.
Speaking of the current state of animation, do you find inspiration or maybe just pure enjoyment out of anything today? Or do you kinda go back to your favorites?
I love what’s going on in the independent scene, of course. It’s funny, there’s not that many people doing this, and we’ve all become a little, over the years, more closely knit. There’s more of us at film festivals and things, and by us, I mean like independent animators who are doing this and nothing else. We don’t have day jobs. It’s a very unusual job. But we end up chatting online a lot. We’re all in our own corners of the world, you know. We’re little albino rats in our underground dens doing our projects. [Laughs] It’s nice to stay in touch because it’s sort of an unusual support group; to see what everyone else is working on.
I love classic Disney. A few years ago they released these Disney archived things on DVD in these metal tins. Yeah, one of them is for their Tomorrowland stuff. It’s from the TV show that they had in the 50′s, it’s all their science-fiction stuff. And there’s a hour-long special on there that that Ward Kimble directed called Mars and Beyond and it’s just amazing. It’s amazing that this was produced for television, and it’s brilliant. It’s science, but it’s educational and it’s crazy creative. And it’s again, that 50′s very modern design, and I like the cheesy-ness of science-fiction, also. But by and large I don’t watch a lot of animation. I went to a very traditional film school and all my heroes were live-action guys, and I never even took an animation course in school. I’m self-taught. Most of my heroes are live-action people. If I’m asked to jury animation at a film festival I’ll beg them to put me on a documentary or anything but more cartoons.
[Both laugh] With this project, World of Tomorrow, it’s been exciting to just follow your Twitter account and see you pretty much have full control over the marketing and how it’s seen. You just teased it with a little picture last fall and then it was at Sundance and now people can see it two months later. Has that freedom been nice?
Yeah. I’ve had that freedom in my career doing this thing since the 90′s. It’s one really nice luxury of, not just working alone — well, almost alone — but working with no budgets. The main investment in the film isn’t money, it’s my time. And I don’t need to pitch anything. I don’t need to raise money. I can come up with an idea for something and start animating it that weekend. That just feels very organic. It feels great. Meanwhile I’m making a new feature film and it’s going to require a big budget, a big crew, and there’s just lots of waiting. There’s lots of waiting for the funds, lots of waiting for the people to work. It’s nice to have these projects to just leap onto and just do it. And, of course, by proxy to that, you own everything. We own all the rights. We can figure out the best release pattern for each one.

With the project you mentioned, Antarctica, is that something that you feel like you’ve been building towards? Is it something you could’ve foreseen yourself getting into five years ago or has it come at the perfect time when you’re ready to take a bigger step?
Well, the script is old. The script is over five years old. It’s been a project that’s been gestating for a very long time. Back when I was writing it I didn’t have the time to leap onto it because I was ramping up the Beautiful Day stories. It’s funny, I feel much, much less intimidated by the size of it than I would have in my twenties. I feel like animating independently, especially working with film stuff, it’s so grueling and it’s so time consuming. It’s really hard to explain or describe to people who haven’t animated, but it’s months and years of your life. It’s like a time hole you enter –
[Both laugh]
– and you work, and you work, and you work, and you emerge and these friends have gotten married, these friends moved away, these guys have kids now. They look at life as the same. You’re frozen in a block of ice, because all you’ve had time to do is finish this project. So to me, approaching a project that’s like this, with actual crew, with an actual budget, I almost feel like — and I don’t wanna jinx myself here — but I almost feel like it’s going to be a bit of a vacation for me. You know, I’m putting in the same amount of time, but my hands aren’t going to be bleeding over this thing anymore, you know? I’m not going to be having to work every single day without a vacation, the weekends, constantly, as much as I used to. So I almost feel like I’ve been through basic training — the worst kind of marines basic training for animation you could imagine [laughs] and now, I can’t see it being as difficult as it used to be. It might be kind of nice.
So, Snoot Entertainment is producing Antarctica. Have you seen like The Guest or Faults, their previous movies?
The Guest, that’s the Adam Wingard film, right? I haven’t seen that one yet. I saw the one they worked on where they are making bets all night, Cheap Thrills. They were involved with that one. I actually haven’t seen The Guest yet. I should put that on my Netflix queue. That one is your favorite?
It’s a fun one. Yeah, that one and they just released a new film a few weeks ago called Faults. It’s really good.
Okay.
I’m just excited for you to be working with them, because they seem like a very smart producing team.
Oh, good to know. [Laughs] I’m familiar with them of course. They’re wonderful. They seem to get it. I’m glad that someone can verify that it shows through in the work they do. I haven’t had the chance to catch up on a lot of it but I will be doing so now.
Yeah, I would recommend it. Well, thank you so much, I’m very excited to let people know they can finally watch [World of Tomorrow] soon.
[Laughs] Cool. Yeah, it’s gonna be interesting to see how the film does online. It’s an experiment for me. I’ve never released something new like this and hopefully if it does well we can follow through with more stuff like this in the future. We’ve got all the old films too on HD that haven’t been put out yet. I’m just trying to feel out how people want to consume them these days, you know? Is it more streaming? Is it something else? I think everyone in the industry is trying to figure out the same thing.
Yeah, definitely. It’s definitely a tricky area depending on the movie. I think for your short, it’s the perfect way though. I would assume, let’s hope.
I hope so. It’s going be a great experiment. There’ll be no excuses if nobody shows up for it because we’ve really done everything we can. Okay, it’ll be a clear message if nobody wants to do the streaming thing.[ Laughs]
Well, have a great day and thank you so much for talking to me.
Thanks, I appreciate it. - Jordan Raup    thefilmstage.com/features/don-hertzfeldt-talks-world-of-tomorrow-the-state-of-animation-his-next-feature-and-more/