In my books an AUTOLOAD catching getters and setters is almost always better replaced with a call to a function which creates getters and setters by assigning closures to typeglobs. Like this bare-bones example:

use strict;
package Parent;

sub make_accessors {
  my ($class, @attributes) = @_;
  foreach my $attribute (@attributes) {
    no strict 'refs';
    *{"$class\::$attribute"} = sub {
      my $self = shift;
      if (@_) {
        $self->{$attribute} = shift;
      }
      return $self->{$attribute};
    };
  }
}


package Child;
our @ISA = 'Parent';
__PACKAGE__->make_accessors(qw(this that the other));
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And now the method cascading that you asked for comes for free from Perl's OO dispatch. There is no AUTOLOAD issue to figure out how to resolve because there is no AUTOLOAD to confuse the issue.