at the end when she was teleported to probably the ice age or stone age, i felt relieve when she was teleported back to her home. however, i felt disappointment with how it ultimately ended with her safely back home. it may be the demented in me and i know it would have caused a paradox but for some reason i would've wanted her to have been stranded where she was initially transported to.
shareIf you really want that sweet little girl to die in agony, you still get your wish -- that's what happens to her final copy in the far future.
"What are you plotting?"
I share your disappointment. The funny thing is that if that seemingly botched time travel wasn't included I wouldn't have missed it, but the way it was handled indicated some lack of courage to me. Since Emily is returned safely to her time that short scene turns out to be a cheap trick. Firstly the film is already paradoxical in nature (for example the advice Emily gives herself) and the implications of such a surprising ending would have baffled the viewers even more; and while it may be pointless to discuss the internal logic of a short animation, the fact that just Emily's return trip should take two jumps seems too random.
Yeah it was a cop-out. They didn't have the balls to just end it with that miserable ending, but then they still wanted to act like they did. So they ended up with something that made no sense and lacked courage.
shareShe had to end up back where she started . . . otherwise her future, meaning her clones (and the film) would not have been possible.
Not really. It could just mean her timeline got cut off and died with her.
All that stuff about the future of humanity as a whole would still be as it was told.
Either way the quiet cold ending of the snowy death would have been better imo.
Her ending up dying in the wrong timeline would have only made an alternative universe with that parallel timeline.
You can't just take her out of the original timeline and expect everything else to just remain the same for other people there and in the future.
One possibility that was pointed out by someone else in another thread is that she was, in fact, sent back to the distant past due to the "very dangerous time travel." And because of that, her clones never existed to transport her to the future, and then mistakenly transport her to the distant past. So, she ends up back in the present after a little glitch in time, and all her clones cease to exist. Honestly, that's pretty grim too.
shareI think that would have been far too easy an ending. It's easy to end a film with a simple tragedy. Granted, you won't see that in a lot of Hollywood films. But Don Hertzfeldt is no Hollywood director to begin with. The ending he ultimately went with was a better one and a more thought out one because it wasn't just a meaningless gut-punch, it was an illustration of the film's theme. When the audience thinks that little girl's about to starve to death in lord knows what century, and then sees her safely back in the present, they can get a better appreciation for the worth of the present just like Emily does.
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Pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source. True humility is the antidote to shame.