Day After Tomorrow Short Form

[Lalo Scalf]

Thefilm shows a disastrous and abrupt climate change. Due to man-made global warming, first the Larsen B ice shelf breaks up (this did happen in the real world, see animation of satellite images - allegedly only after the authors had written it into the film). This event is used to introduce the main paleo-climatologist character, Jack Hall, who is drilling out there and narrowly escapes.

Later, in the north, meltwater inflow brings the North Atlantic Current to a halt, causing severe cooling. This happens in a matter of days. A super-storm is triggered by the oceanic shutdown. This covers much of the northern hemisphere in a few giant cyclones. It causes the flooding of Manhattan, huge hailstones in Tokyo, tornados in LA, and several days of severe snow storm covering the entire northern continents. In the eye of these super-cyclones extremely cold air is sucked down from the upper troposphere to the surface and shock-freezes the Manhattan sky-scrapers. When the super-storm clears after some days, most of the northern hemisphere is snow-covered and doomed to a new ice age due to the well-known snow-albedo feedback (i.e., the snow reflects so much sunlight that the climate stays cold).

On the other hand, given the rules and constraints of the genre, it is remarkable to what extent the film-makers have tried to include some realistic background. Early in the film a UN climate conference in Delhi is shown where Jack Hall gives a talk about the possible risk of a shut-down of the North Atlantic Current. I gave a very similar talk at such a UN conference in Buenos Aires in 1998 - I even showed the same diagram. In the film talk, Hall states that a shutdown might occur in a hundred years, or a thousand, or not at all. Many real climatologists have said the same thing. In this way, what climatologists think is presented in a realistic way in the film, and it is very clear that the rapid drama that later unfolds is counter to what any climatologist expected - it's where the fiction starts.

After a preview of the film in Berlin I had the chance of a good talk with the script writer, Jeffrey Nachmanoff, and I was quite impressed how well-informed about the science and politics of global climate change he was.

I think it would be a mistake and not do the film justice if scientists simply dismiss it as nonsense. For what it is, a blockbuster movie that has to earn back 120 M$ production cost, it is probably as good as you can get. For this type of movie for a very broad audience it is actually quite subversive and manages to slip in many thought-provoking things. I'm sure people will not confuse the film with reality, they are not stupid - they will know it is a work of fiction. But I hope that it will stir their interest for the subject, and that they might take more notice when real climate change and climate policy will be discussed in future.

A discussion of the risk of a shut-down of this circulation is found in Shifting seas in the greenhouse? (Nature, 399, 523-524), and in The thermohaline ocean circulation - a system with dangerous thresholds? (Climatic Change, 46, 247-256).

A global warming scenario that shows such a shut-down was published in Long-term global warming scenarios computed with an efficient coupled climate model (Climatic Change, 43, 353-367). You can watch a computer animation of this scenario.

Paleoclimatologist Jack Hall must make a daring trek from Washington, D.C. to New York City, to reach his son, who is trapped in the crosshairs of a sudden international storm which plunges the planet into a new ice age.

In 2004, soon after completing one of the first studies of American views on climate change, I started to see trailers for The Day After Tomorrow (TDAT). Immediately, I could see that it was going to be a Hollywood blockbuster that millions of Americans would watch, and it was going to describe climate change in a completely new way for the public.

Even after controlling for demographic and political factors, people who saw the film became more convinced that climate change was real, became more worried about it, changed their conceptual model of how climate change actually works, became more supportive of climate policy, and became more willing to say that they at least intended to change their behaviors.

Furthermore, empathetic and vicarious experiences are one of the real opportunities of social impact entertainment. We love these experiences so much that we as filmgoers spent $40.6 billion in 2017 to put ourselves in dark rooms with strangers to watch them unfold! These stories shape our lives, they shape how we think about the world, and they can shape our identities.

Naturally, TDAT spurred a lot of viewers to seek out further information. Many organizations tried to leverage the film to advance the cause of tackling climate change, setting up websites to assist moviegoers who might have questions after seeing the film. Audiences did have questions, but most websites only launched on the day the film came out.

LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST: At first glance, it seems like a charming cartoon, stick figure animation featuring a tiny child's voice. But the content is not childish. This short animated film, which is up for an Oscar, is called "World Of Tomorrow." The message of this story, about a clone from the future speaking to her original, is difficult to describe, even for the creator, Don Hertzfeldt.DON HERTZFELDT: It's one of those things that if I was smart enough to explain it in words, I wouldn't have had to make a movie out of it. It's a love letter to science fiction. I've loved science fiction my whole life. But I've never made a science fiction movie. And it's sort of a parody of science fiction at the same time. It's all of the things I find interesting in sci-fi amplified.WERTHEIMER: Well, let's listen to a clip. We introduce the two main characters. First is the adult stick figure.(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WORLD OF TOMORROW")JULIA POTT: (As Emily) Hello, Emily.WINONA MAE: (As Emily Prime) Hi.POTT: (As Emily) One day, when you are old enough, you will be impregnated with a perfect clone of yourself. You will later upload all of your memories into this healthy new body.WERTHEIMER: So we learn that the little child that you just heard there is Emily, is the real Emily, or Emily Prime, as she's called in the cartoon. And her response, really, is just chatter.(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WORLD OF TOMORROW")MAE: (As Emily Prime) I had lunch today.WERTHEIMER: (Laughter) That sounds like a real little girl. Is this an actress being a real little girl?HERTZFELDT: That's my 4-year-old niece being a real little girl.WERTHEIMER: Oh, my God, really?HERTZFELDT: Yeah, I was writing this piece, and I knew I needed a little girl, and I didn't want to fake it. And so my niece was 4 years old at the time. Her name is Winona. She lives in Scotland, and I live in Texas.WERTHEIMER: (Laughter).HERTZFELDT: And so I don't get to see her very often. And so we get together usually for the holidays, and I have, like, five days with her. And we just hung out, and I quietly recorded her while we drew pictures and played around with toys and talked about the world. I asked her questions, and I walked away with these sessions. And it was sort of like a fun puzzle to kind of figure out what she could be looking at when they're doing these things. And then once I sorted that out, I brought in Julia Pott, who voiced the adult Emily and rewrote her lines so that they could have a conversation.WERTHEIMER: Now what you're stuck with is that what you and your little niece created here, everybody else is interpreting, being it seems as though you're exploring what it means to be human, what it means to have memories. At one point, the Emily clone falls in love. First, she falls in love with a rock, and then she falls in love with some kind of unintelligible being from another world. And you don't want us tempted to think that you were trying to tell us that whatever it is that makes us human, you know, it persists. It continues to exist.HERTZFELDT: Sure. I hope so. You know, I think one of the reasons I love science fiction so much is that it's - when it's ideally done right, it's a reflection on ourselves. You know, no matter what decade it comes from, it's representing the present. I think, yeah, with the cloning story, she's learning what it's like to be human. She's learning what it's like to love something, and she winds up breaking this alien thing's heart. And to me, you know, everyone goes through that at some point in adolescence, you know. There's - you meet someone when you're a young teenager, and they're never right for you, and you always wind up hurting someone on the way to figuring out all this stuff. But it was a fun writing process, you know. I not only had Winona's little bits, but science fiction, it's worldbuilding. I mean, you can get away with anything. You can do anything, and it's so free. And, you know, to be animating at the same time, it's the ultimate freedom in filmmaking because you can literally put anything on the screen that you can imagine.WERTHEIMER: I want you to tell us about the dark ending. It's one of the funniest conversations that Emily the clone has with Emily Prime. It's about how people are coming like shooting stars out of space.HERTZFELDT: Yeah, I'll do my best to set this clip up. So time travel is a thing. It can be very dangerous, and it's also very - it's an expensive thing to do. There's a meteor headed towards the planet, and the lower classes can't afford to escape the planet. And so they're using discount time travel to try and desperately get themselves out of the time that they're in to a safer place. And in doing so, time travel is so unpredictable, and they're using this really cheap method. All they're doing is just warping themselves into planetary orbit. And so there's a ring of dead bodies around the earth, and so our characters are looking at the night sky, and they're watching the bodies fall like shooting stars.(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WORLD OF TOMORROW")POTT: (As Emily) The dead bodies burn as they return to Earth and now light up our night sky.MAE: (As Emily Prime) What's this up in the sky?POTT: (As Emily) Dead bodies.MAE: (As Emily Prime) Look, another one.POTT: (As Emily) Yes, it is very pretty.MAE: (As Emily Prime) OK.POTT: (As Emily) No, they're all dead.WERTHEIMER: (Laughter) Well, you know, several of us have watched your short film here, and we had a lot of different reactions around the building. I mean, sometimes people were laughing, and some people were just incredibly sad at the dystopia that you have painted and what happens to a central Emily when she's cloned a few times. What do you expect the audience to take away?HERTZFELDT: That all sounds wonderful to me. It's great for me to hear, you know, those different reactions because when I travel with a movie like this, it's very similar, you know. You'll hear a line in one city get a big laugh, and then in another city, the same line kind of gets a gasp, and that's wonderful. I mean, to me, you know, after working so long on something like this, it's great to go out and meet people and see the reactions and remind yourself that, oh, yeah, you know, I wasn't just working in a cave by myself for no reason, you know. There are people waiting for this and hopefully having some sort of connection to it.WERTHEIMER: Don Hertzfeldt's new short is called "World Of Tomorrow." It's up for an Academy award. If you want to look at it, it's on Netflix. Thank you.HERTZFELDT: Thanks. Thanks for inviting me.

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