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.")

"The lady has foolishly attempted to join the conversation with a wild and dangerous opinion of her own! What half-baked drivel! See how the men look at her with utter contempt!"

I'm letting myself slightly off the hook do to Wikipedia's account that "almost nothing is known about his early years." Please ignore the next line that claims he "enjoyed a close relationship with Emperor Leopold I, was ennobled by him, and rose to the rank of Kapellmeister in 1679." Or the subsequent claim that he "was one of the most important violinists of the period, and an important influence on later German and Austrian composers for violin." Or that he "was the foremost Austrian composer of instrumental music of his day."

OK, so that's not quite the same thing as being doomed by your greatness, I suppose. But it does seem fair to say that Stanton's film was at least somewhat doomed by the greatness -- or by the great influence --  of its source material. Isn't that ironic? Your work is dismissed as predictable and derivative, yet it's really everyone else's work that's borrowing from you (or from your source), not the other way 'round.

 I discovered that it's not terribly easy to find versions from many classic German performers. Not because there are no available recordings, but because they're frequently not evenin Italian; they're in German. And the German sounds incredibly weird, especially after listening to so many Italian versions in such quick succession.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across a YouTube video called "14 World Famous Tenors Sing Nessun Dorma!" that was nothing but a series of excerpted clips featuring numerous tenors performing the same section of Puccini's famous aria from "Turandot." And I really loved it.