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Hello, everyone, welcome back to week 2 of my scrapbook.

I'm still cranking away on the "Hair High" animated feature. The Ani-cam is still very popular - I just got an e-mail from a fan in China.

Gersh from the N.Y. Post came by on Monday to do an article about the Ani-cam. It should be out next week.

The animation's going well - I'm now working on the car-chase
scene that leads up to the death of Cheri and Spud. It's a lot
of fun because it goes by so fast and there's very little dialogue - and as you know, dialogue really bogs me down. To me, the perfect animated film would have no dialogue at all.

Which brings me to "Winged Migration", a French bird documentary that I saw this week as part of the Oscar documentary screenings. It's an exquisitely filmed compendium of different birds of the world as they migrate thousands of miles - but the trick is that the filmmakers were able to fly right beside the birds, as they muscled their way through wind and snow, and even major cities like Paris and New York. It was a quite beautiful and personal look at these magnificent birds, and had no dialogue.

Michael Moore, the documentary filmmaker was there - I chatted with him about his new animated feature project with Tom Tomorrow. I worked with Michael, unknowingly, 20 years ago when I sold my political cartoons to his weekly Flint, MI newspaper. And his was one of the few publications that paid on time...

Although I thought "Bowling for Columbine" was a brave and entertaining film, I have some major issues with it. The most egregious problem is the fact that the impression one gets from the film is that most of the gun problems in the U.S. are caused by Dick Clark and Charlton Heston, and he totally ignores black-on-black violence.

The rap music culture is filled with references to gangstas, gang banging and posses - and the highest murder rate in this country is black-on-black violence. For Mr. Moore to make a documentary about gun violence and totally ignore the black victims is to do a disservice to the entire black community.

See you all next week,
Bill Plympton