Director Don Hertzfeldt is a two-time Academy Award nominee whose animated films include It’s Such a Beautiful Day, The Meaning of Life, and Rejected. His work has played around the world, receiving over 250 awards, and Don was asked to animate a couch gag on The Simpsons in 2014. 7 of his films have screened in competition at the Sundance Film Festival, where he is the only filmmaker to have won the overall Grand Jury Prize for Short Film twice.
In 2015 Don Hertzfeldt‘s animated short World of Tomorrow built a complete vision of the future, investigated the terrors of technological advancement, and ruminated on the power and pitfalls of the human condition with depth and imagination some sci-fi writers spend a career trying to achieve.
Rolling Stone magazine ranked World of Tomorrow #10 on its list of the “Greatest Animated Movies Ever.”
The World of Tomorrow films will be preceded by a specially recorded video message Don has made for The London International Animation Festival audience.
At Barbican book tickets
The World of Tomorrow (Don Hertzfeldt, USA)
A little girl named Emily meets a visitor who brings her a poignant message from the future. Their conversation drags the pair to the outer reaches of space, through time, wending in and out of reality. Visually ravishing and truly mind-bending – one of the finest achievements in sci-fi in recent memory.
17min, 2015
The World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts (Don Hertzfeldt, USA)
Don Hertzfeldt’s highly anticipated sequel The World of Tomorrow Episode Two is every bit as stunning, inspiring and heartbreaking as the first film. Here we find Emily Prime, a young girl, swept inside the brain of an incomplete back-up clone of her future self, who’s on a mission to reboot her broken mind. Both films were written entirely around candid audio recordings of Hertzfeldt’s 5 year-old niece.
23min, 2017