I really, really love hand-drawn animation like this. Always have. There's just something so alive about it. The fact that it's not quite as perfect as its CG siblings is actually a feature, not a bug, as far as I'm concerned. Makes it feel more organic, somehow.

"Last week while visiting Le Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy, photographer Loïc Lagarde captured this awesome view of the tidal island at night with the Milky Way spanning the sky above, further highlighting the near fairy-tale nature of the historic landmark."

Actually, you know what? Howard Shore's score for PJ's three Tolkien films isn't "one of the best things" about the trilogy. It's far-and-away the best thing, featuring some of the greatest themes ever written for the screen, and adding a truly astonishing richness and vibrancy to the cinematic tapestry before us.

Animation is an incredibly complex (and super-humanly time-consuming) process. At least if you want Good (Even Great) Animation. And that means there are lots and lots (and lots) of cooks workin' on the animated broth. In this case, there were clearly not the proverbial "too many," but the question of how one ends up with a single creative vision when the work's being done by so many hands is a fascinating one. (I suspect Moore is mostly to blame.)

I was very surprised to see Konstantin Bronzit's "We Can't Live Without Cosmos" featured as part of The New Yorker's "The Screening Room" series. Now that I've seen it, it seems unlikely to beat out either Hertzfeldt's strange-but-wonderful fable or the 800-lb gorilla of Pixar and "Sanjay's Super Team." But it's charming and insightful and a bit sad all on its own, and I'm glad to have had a chance to see it before it fades into the background after The Big, Glamorous Night.

Put together by the good-and-talented folks at AustronautiCAST, the official Facebook channel and publicity arm of the Italian Space and Astronautics Association (ISAA). If the Aurora Borealis section doesn't take your breath away, you might want to double-check to see if you're actually alive. Gorgeous.

From Great Big Story: "Imagine an island filled only with rabbits. Okunoshima is a small island in Japan’s Inland Sea. It's called 'Rabbit Island' because of the thousands of feral rabbits that roam the land. No one knows exactly how they got there, but since the end of World War II, the rabbits have been doing what they do best … multiplying."

But you know what else that Opus post helped me to realize? That Pyle had formed me not only through his own works, but through his profound impact on the only other person (with the possible exceptions of Gary Larson and Bill Watterson) who influenced my youthful imagination more than he himself had done: N. C. Wyeth, whose days as a 19-year-old student at Pyle's Brandywine School played a huge role in his style (and success.)

A piece from my college roommate and long-time, close friend, Dr. Jeremy Holmes, in which he writes on the difference between fairy tales and science fiction (and fleshes out those differences with a bit of help from "the numinous.")