World Of Tomorrow

"I am a third generation Emily", says Emily, to Emily, not her younger self, but herself, of sorts, younger. "Grandma", says young Emily, but Emily corrects her - in a sense Emily is Emily's grandmother, but it's a bit more complicated than that.

This is properly Science Fictional, capital S, capital F, with time travel and space travel and explorations of consciousness and nested implications about identity and humanity and continuity of self and beeping noises and colours and "many of our brave clones are accidentally crushed beneath the ground".

It's crisply drawn in Hertzfeldt's signature-ish style, simple lines and colour fields, other things atop, and massively inventive - Emily Prime's running just looks right, Emily's looks of frustration and of jaded adult wonder are impressionistic, minimal, in their own way perfect.

Voice work by Winona Mae as the younger/earlier Emily, Julia Pott as the older/later Emily, is charming, comic, hilarious. They are a thread through an anthology of sorts, of ideas about art, history, memory. There are shades of Philip K Dick ("I loved him as though we were originals"), Douglas Adams, Iain Banks, the matter of factness of "end of life procedures" speaks to a series of speculative traditions that starts and ends with human problems and human solutions caused and brought about by science. Even if that science is memory retrieval, alien foster care, transference of identity, the telephone - the textural paperness of the animation, the outernet, the notion of "disappearance into... safe infinity", there's still the human element, and it is refined here, pure.