Young child Emily is contacted by the third generation clone of herself from 220 years into the future. This Emily brings child Emily into the future and shows her the world that she will soon live in.
I have read quite a few user comments here that attempt to sum up all the themes and ideas within this short film, and mostly I think they both do it well but also do the film a huge disservice by so crudely laying it out with their words. The film plays out with a great sense of humor combined with angst, despair, beauty, hope, and death. The flat emotional tone of future Emily makes this mix work very well, and the contrast with the simple child Emily also adds to the emotional core of the piece. And this core does exist, although you would think it would struggle under so many darker ideas and themes.
The animation is at once simplistic (the Emilys are stick figures) but yet fantastic in the creativity of the world in which it occurs; everything is pretty minimalist in design but yet there is plenty of detail that makes it visually engaging and quite wonderful to watch. It is the dark gallows humor that sticks with me though, in particular the way that it is used to deliver a message about what is important in life. This short has been very successful and is very well known, so it doesn't need me to say much about it – but it is a great piece of work that is well worth seeing for how creative, intelligent, funny, moving, and entertaining it is.
