The 2015 Fantastic Fest in Austin, TX has so far screened some of this year’s most anticipated genre movies, including The Lobster and Anomalisa, but it’s Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow that leaves the biggest bombshell on the science fiction landscape. While already a major festival hit in 2014, winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and Best Animated Short at SXSW, March 2015 finally saw an official release for World of Tomorrow through Vimeo. And while it’s speculative power is just as glowing on the small screen, seeing World of Tomorrow projected as the opener for the Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson stop-motion movie Anomalisa provided definitive proof that World of Tomorrow is one of the best pieces of genre storytelling of the current generation.

World of Tomorrow Teaser

Starring Don Hertzfeldt’s 4-year-old niece Winona as Emily (“I very naively thought I could direct a 4-year-old, you can’t direct a 4-year-old,” Hertzfeldt told Fantastic Fest audiences) and Julia Pott as Emily hundreds of years older and wiser, World of Tomorrow begins as a tour of the future and ends as a profound statement on human purpose and growing up. For science fiction fans World of Tomorrow is loaded with riches, containing more big science fiction ideas in its 16 minute runtime than the past 10 years of Sundance indies.

World of Tomorrow Clip

World of Tomorrow is still available on Vimeo for $3.99, which is about a dollar per entire-Alexander-C.-Clarke-paperback-of-ideas.