Friday Linkage

As I saw A Scanner Darkly, which you can see the first 24 minutes of here, on Thursday, let's give this week a bit of a theme.

The National Film Board has put a number of short animated movies online, including some real classics. I really liked The Owl Who Married a Goose, based on an old Inuit tale, a lot more than the ones that beat you over the head with a "message," although "La Faim" is notable for using computer animation(at the NRC, Canadians were pioneers in this field,)in 1974, I shudder to think of how long it must have taken to do that very simple 'morphing' 2D animation.

You can watch the whole pilot episode of, to quote the Sci-Fi Channel, a "send-up of Lovecraftian horror and steampunk adventure," The Amazing Screw-On Head. I'm no expert on either of those things, but it's not bad. The titular hero, voiced by Paul Giamatti, is a...well I suppose some sort of undead entity inhabiting a robotic head...who fights supernatural crime for Abraham Lincoln.

This isn't really keeping with the theme of animation(of course there was plenty of computer animation in it)but it is a movie I've seen lately. Anyway, here's a quite serious essay on why the world would be better off if Superman hired an agent and charged for his services.