Ani­ma­tion leg­end Don Hertzfeldt is ready­ing a third World of Tomor­row short

If we are to be saved from this mul­ti-front glob­al cat­a­clysm by a sin­gle work of art, it’ll have to be some­thing good. If the ghost of David Bowie was to return with a new LP, if Don­ald Glover could get his act togeth­er and com­plete anoth­er sea­son of Atlanta, if, if, if – we might stand a chance. But today, we have a light of hope, and it’s real, and it’s happening.

Ani­ma­tion leg­end Don Hertzfeldt has descend­ed from the fog-swathed moun­tain­top on which I assume he spends more of his free time med­i­tat­ing to grace us once again with a clever, heart-man­gling sci­ence-fic­tion short. He announced ear­li­er this week that his pop­u­lar World of Tomor­row series will soon gain a third install­ment, and though a release date has yet to be announced, a trail­er and poster have arrived to make it real.

The first two shorts have tak­en view­ers through a future-world of geo­met­ric and tem­po­ral abstrac­tion, as lit­tle human Emi­ly Prime gets a vis­it from adult clone of her­self from the future. In the first, future-Emi­ly gives Emi­ly Prime a grand pre­dic­tion of the many joys and tragedies that will befall her in her life, and in the sec­ond, a clone from even far­ther in the future returns to seek Emi­ly Prime’s help in pre­serv­ing what’s left of her dete­ri­o­rat­ing consciousness.

The new short seems to focus on a new­ly intro­duced char­ac­ter named David Prime. The brief snip­pet below shows us David Prime, clad in a space­suit with quad­ran­gles of men­tal woozi­ness float­ing around his head, trudg­ing effort­ful­ly through a vacant dis­tant plan­et. To play the odds, we can safe­ly assume that cur­rents of melan­choly, long­ing, regret, and all those oth­er fun emo­tions will flow through the short.

A new work from Hertzfeldt will always be cause for excite­ment, but his work does seem par­tic­u­lar suit­ed to this cur­rent moment of iso­la­tion, hope­less­ness, uncer­tain­ty, and con­fu­sion. Short of con­triv­ing an actu­al vac­cine for the coro­n­avirus, this has to be the most mean­ing­ful act of pub­lic good that Hertzfeldt could have done for us.