BSA306, Don Hertzfeldt review, 28 March, 2017

don hertzfeldt world of tomorrow

A third-generation clone reaches out to her prime, a child in the past, to share stories of her life and retrieve a memory.  Through simple stick figures, swirls of colour, and the recorded ramblings of a child combined with a scripted adult, Hertzfeldt creates an absurdly comic and ultimately touching short film about memory, growing up, and the end of life.

Hertzfeldt's style is deceptively simple.  Each frame is thoughtfully composed and coloured to give the characters the emotional heft that their stick frames lack.  The story begins as a goof, a clone reaches out to a previous self and reaches her when she's a toddler, and slowly develops from silly sci-fi to a sad rumination on a woman who tried to live her life fully, and extra-lengthily, but is still going to die like everyone else in an incomprehensible disaster.