Shorts Films in Focus: "World of Tomorrow" | Features

The film has a comedic tone that recalls Douglas Adams' work. Would you consider him an influence?  What other influences might there be?

Someone else said that too, and I'm embarrassed to say I'm not really familiar with his work. I have a vague memory of reading part of one of those “Hitchhiker” books in the 7th grade but I must have given it up and went back to Stephen King or something. The influences for "World of Tomorrow" were a bit scattered. I'd wanted to make a science fiction film for a long time, so I had a backlog of spare ideas floating around, some of them over ten years old. A few other pieces of the story came directly from a graphic novel I wrote in 2013, which itself was probably heavily, overly influenced by Edward Gorey, though I'm not sure if that really reflects in the movie. Other moments can come from things as simple as hearing a song lyric. My writing is usually a mess of unrelated stuff ... things drift by, get scribbled on Post-it notes, and I eventually gather them together and try to make sense of it. Overall, I've always been a big fan of pulpy science fiction, the optimistic yet somehow terrifying science fiction of the 40's and 50's, where logic took a back seat to some really giant, weird ideas. Some sort of abstract, horrible space doom was always right around the corner, you could disintegrate into a black hole, go mad inside a computer for eternity, or get accidentally marooned thousands of years into the past, yet it was all in the plucky spirit of progress somehow. There's not a lot of sprawling, weird-idea driven science fiction around right now. It's mostly trended towards realism, like having to rescue Matt Damon from Mars. I remember when I first saw "A.I.", the moment it suddenly said, "2000 years later," I thought, "Yes! Yes, show me that!" and I realized how desperate I was for seeing those big risky weird ideas again. Because even if they fail, at least they did it really interestingly.

So much of your work encompasses with works of classical composers like Strauss and Wagner. Does music help inspire some of the sequences you produce?

Most of the time, finding the right marriage of music comes after the fact. I animated a thing for "The Simpsons" where I played a Chopin piece on the piano—that's the only music I can think of right now that I had in mind before I started drawing. I may be misremembering this, but I'm pretty sure the Richard Strauss waltz in "World of Tomorrow" came in after everything was animated. I probably knew I wanted to use it, but I didn't know where yet, or how frequently. Incidentally, speaking of "A.I.", apparently Stanley Kubrick had intended to use that same Strauss piece for the film, but he never got the chance. So I swiped it instead.

Both "It's Such A Beautiful Day" and "World of Tomorrow" have themes of unrequited love and loneliness.  What brings you back to these themes?

As a writer, it's more interesting when things don't work out. "Happily ever after" is a pretty boring story to tell. Unrequited love and loneliness is also probably far more common and relatable in most people's lives. I wanted Emily's stunted emotional progress to be as clumsy and painful as every adolescent experience. Most of us gravitated towards all the wrong partners and hurt people on accident in those first messy relationships. Emily is just going through the same thing, only with rocks and fuel pumps and strange creatures. When we recorded the line, "He followed me around for seven years saying unintelligible things," Julia said, "Yep, been in that relationship."