With the Vimeo (self-)release of World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime in early October, stalwart Californian independent animator Don Herztfeldt has presented the latest chapter in his ongoing success story. Over 25 years, Hertzfeldt’s career has been constantly building in ambition and scope, and judging from initial reactions, his newest effort—tellingly, his most elaborate as well as his longest standalone work to date, clocking in at 34 minutes—is another winner with critics and audiences. This third foray into the World of Tomorrow universe, which was first entered in 2015 with the eponymous, Oscar-nominated short, also qualifies as Hertzfeldt’s most expansive exercise in sheer storytelling, while still staying true to the lifelong concerns of his work. Unlike World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts (2017), which, the pile-up of temporal paradoxes permitting, could be considered both a straightforward sequel and a kind of mirror image to the inaugural short—slightly reframing its somewhat tongue-in-cheek sci-fi time-travel premise while delving deeper into serious existential philosophy and commentary on a mostly mediated world—this third episode tackles Hertzfeldt’s key themes of time and memory (as well as love and loss) from a decidedly different angle, while fitting neatly into some of the loopholes left open in the story so far.
At the same time, it may say something about the film’s conception that some of those loopholes had not been previously apparent even to the most devoted fans of the earlier entries (which, for easier readability, are henceforth abbreviated as WOT 1 and WOT 2). WOT 3 already starts somewhere else, but midway through transforms into a deliberately convoluted time travel-paradox genre piece that not only keeps on channelling Chris Marker’s melancholy masterpiece La Jetée (1962)—whose inventive approach to storytelling and bittersweet worldview (accepting the inevitable without resorting to hopelessness) must surely have resonated with Hertzfeldt—but also joins and simultaneously parodies the wave of those more recent riddle movies that are more about pretentious puzzles than the philosophy at the core; it’s like the collected works of Christopher Nolan or Rian Johnson’s Looper (2012), except that, like Timecop (1994), it’s a million times better than either.
And yet, especially after having arrived at the ambiguous ending of Hertzfeldt’s latest, one would not be entirely wrong to proclaim it an (admittedly more multilayered) version of his first stu-dent film, the two-minute, one-joke (1995), whose protagonist, and not just in the satiric trappings that skewer many aspects of modern life and virtual relationships. The difficulty of making a connection is a subject that has remained at the core of Hertzfeldt’s filmmaking, but what was, in the beginning, a flippant series of variations on the simple act of asking for a date, has been upgraded to a noble quest for a possibly impossible love, suffused with a yearning that stretches over eons of time. It feels like something that befits medieval literature more than contemporary filmmaking, although it does possess a (potentially unconscious) kinship with , Cixin Liu’s celebrated trilogy of science-fiction novels.
