World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime

World of Tomorrow Episode Three (2020) is Don Hertzfeldt's hand-drawn sci-fi short, and you can watch online on iFILM. Thirty-four minutes of stick figures adrift in bursts of color and static.

Subtitled The Absent Destinations of David Prime, the chapter opens with a buried memory yanking David across time and space. He has to untangle a lethal puzzle built around his own time-traveling future selves. Hertzfeldt animates every frame by hand, and under the crude shapes sits the quiet melancholy that has run through World of Tomorrow since 2015: memory, loss, the loneliness of a copied mind. This is not a Disney cartoon but a pocket-sized philosophy lesson for viewers who do not mind sadness behind the smile. Stream World of Tomorrow Episode Three online on iFILM.