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You could call them “sky flowers,” but that doesn’t really make sense either—after all, the faded blue behind each squiggle is water, not sky, and the squiggles themselves don’t represent solid objects in any tangible, meaningful way. But they look right. The reds and greens and yellows add life and color in a way that a flat blue might not. Those odd shapes, suspended motionless with no clear reason or value, establish a tone. There are a lot of things that don’t make sense on SpongeBob SquarePants. But there’s a clear and coherent vision that runs through the entire show, from the design of SpongeBob’s kitchen-sponge body down to the squeaky-balloon sound of his footsteps. It’s a perspective, and a warm, specific, crazy little world. Of course it has sky flowers in it. What else would be up there?

Miles Morales struggles to balance his responsibilities as a teenager, friend, and student while acting as Brooklyn’s friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. After a particularly challenging day living with these pressures, Miles experiences a panic attack that forces him to confront the manifestations of his anxiety and learn that reaching out for help can be just as brave an act as protecting his city from evil. The Spider Within: A Spider-Verse Story was developed and produced in the inaugural year of Sony Pictures Animation (SPA) and Sony Pictures Imageworks’ (SPI) Leading and Empowering New Storytellers (LENS) program, a 9-month leadership training program that provides candidates from underrepresented groups with an opportunity to gain valuable leadership experience in animation.

Whatever the technical legality of writing off completed films and destroying them for pennies on the dollar, it’s morally reprehensible: Oller memorably calls it “an accounting assassination.” Defending it on grounds that it’s not illegal is bootlicking. The practice also has a whiff of the plot of Mel Brooks’s “The Producers”. The original idea of Brooks’ hustler protagonists Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom was to mount a play so awful that it would close immediately, and they can live off the unspent money they raised from bilking old ladies. When the show unexpectedly becomes a hit, they blow up the theater. The biggest difference between the plot of “The Producers” and what happened to “Batgirl” and “Coyote vs Acme” is that in “The Producers,” the public got to see the play.

We’ve all seen the classic cartoon juggling farce; the character wiggles their arms up and down while the balls fly in a circular pattern in front of their face, yadda yadda yadda. Most jugglers you ask will groan every time they see this. [...] Now what’s really special about juggling when compared to other inaccurately animated activities is that animation as a medium enables artists to create really creative and unique depictions of juggling that would otherwise be impossible in real life. A poorly animated drum set will still sound like a drum set, and a poorly animated piano will still sound like a piano, but quote-unquote “poorly” animated juggling can lead to some really beautiful patterns that have no real life analogue. [...] As I started diving deeper and deeper into this world of animated juggling I became amazed at the huge variety of ways in which juggling can be visually conveyed and obsessed with finding every single example that I possibly could. [...] I have learned a lot from this project, and in this video I wanted to share some of my findings as well as some notable examples that either really impressed me or even pushed my understanding of what counts as animation.