Nevertheless, World of Tomorrow is still wish fulfillment for anyone who has ever wondered what it’d be like to go back in time and bestow the gift of knowledge upon your younger, more ignorant (or merely inexperienced) self. OK, so maybe it’s not that simple of a premise. However, over two hundred years from when Emily Prime answers the phone, the world is about to end, and Emily III is reaching out to her progenitor in order to inform her of what she has to look forward to. The woman contacting her is a third-generation clone of herself – Emily III (voiced by Julia Pott) – created via a futuristic fad in which people produce their own doubles and upload memories into them a feeble attempt at allowing their consciousness to live forever.

The first, Emily Prime (voiced by Winona Mae, Hertzfeldt’s four-year-old niece), is a moppet from our near future, who receives a call from her distant future on an oversized computer console. The premise for Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow ( which is available on Netflix Instant) is deceptively simple. You can buy tickets for the film here and purchase our special Pixar issue of. This article is inspired by the release of Pixar's Finding Dory.

I envy the dead