‘World Of Tomorrow 2’: Don Hertzfeldt’s Oscar-Nominated Short Is Getting A Sequel
Here’s the director’s tweet (hat tip toBirth.Movies.Death), which reveals the film’s official title:
🚀pic.twitter.com/MSd0YIZ5A4
— don hertzfeldt (@donhertzfeldt)June 06, 2025
That’s all the concrete information we have about the follow-up at the moment, and all the rest is just speculation. But let’s go ahead and speculate for a minute, shall we?
It’s fascinating that Hertzfeldt is referring to this as “Episode Two,” because that seems to indicate thatWorld of Tomorrowcould become a sort of catch-all name for a long-running series of episodes – and even the term “episodes” likens this more to an ongoing TV show than a collection of short films. How many entries might we see by the time he decides to wrap it up? Is this Hertzfeldt’s equivalent ofAvatar,a cinematic world he created in which he’ll be content to tell stories across multiple films for years to come, all set in the same universe?
Will we spend more time with Emily Prime this time around? Hertzfeldt used his then-four-year-old niece, Winona Mae, as the voiceover artist for that character, but unless the young girl has managed to time travel back a few years using technology like we see in the original short, she’s older now, so he’d either need to find a new person to provide her voice or depict the character a few years older. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the latter, sinceWorld of Tomorrowitself has a lot to say about the concept of aging (and memory, and love, and loneliness, and you should allreallyjust watch that short if you haven’t yet).
World of Tomorrow, which is bursting with minimalistic art, fun creature designs, and sci-fi tech, was Hertzfeldt’s first foray into digital animation, so I imagine he’ll use similar techniques forWorld of Tomorrow 2. And the sequel’s subtitle –The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts– sounds like it will be a perfect thematic fit for this world.
Looking forward to aWorld of Tomorrowsequel?
