Animation Show founder debuts his latest, ‘I Am So Proud of You’; ‘Heroes’ creator assures us it’s back with a vengeance; Ebert and Damon come up with the best VP zingers.

Animation aficionados, like myself, are no doubt huge fans already, but those who aren’t may not know Don Hertzfeldt by name. Casual viewers may have stumbled across his brilliant shorts such as Rejected, a twisted stick-figure take on marketing gone horribly wrong, or Billy’s Balloon, a delightfully dark battle of balloons versus babies. Those less avid followers have probably never had the opportunity to catch his longest and most accomplished work, Everything Will Be Ok (only here in trailer form, as the full film clocks in at almost 20 minutes), or aware that it won the Jury Prize at Sundance not in an animation category, but for Best Short Film. If you’ve never heard of or seen it, it’s certainly worth tracking down.

I saw it myself back at a previous installment of The Animation Show, the bi-annual touring festival of animated shorts started by Hertzfeldt along with Mike Judge, also worth following if you’re a fan of the medium. But Don has since struck out on his own, leaving that festival to focus on his own work.

Now his latest, I Am So Proud of You, is ready for the public, and he’ll be taking it on a tour of his own in the coming months, each stop with a post-film Q&A. It crosses all over the country and should be high on your list of to-do’s for the fall. I know I will absolutely not miss the Los Angeles stop; too bad it’s the last one, and that I’ll be out of town and unable to drive up to see the Santa Barbara kick-off next week. Check out the full poster with dates below.

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Hey, remember that show Heroes? It was so enjoyable for the first year, lost it’s way a bit the second time around, and has been off the radar for so long it’d be easy to forget what a huge hit it was at one point. Even loyal fans will probably have to refresh their memories a bit before the new episodes start up next week.

For those deciding whether or not to rejoin them for the third season, this great interview with creator Tim Kring should get your nerd juices flowing again.

One of the goals of this season was, because we will have been off the air for nine months, we didn’t want to drag a lot of story behind us. We didn’t want it to feel like you had to have watched two years of this show to catch up. So we wanted things to move really quickly so that you could move forward on this volume and have a kind of clean path in front of you. So there are really not a lot of lingering questions that you will carry with you from before.

The goal for us from now on with these volumes is to try and answer literally ninety-five percent of the questions that are posed in the beginning of the volume and answer them by the end of the volume.

This is exactly the right thing to say in this situation. The cliffhanger endings and big mysteries are great for keeping up the tension from one episode to the next, but when nothing ever ties up, it starts to feel like we’re being teased and abused. That last 5% unanswered keeps people guessing about some of the big over-arching secrets, but at least there are some nice satisfying climaxes along the way to prevent edge-of-your-seat fatigue.

And for the faithful who just want a quick refresher, NBC has two-minute recaps of all the episodes from last season on their Heroes site, so it won’t take more than twenty minutes to get back in gear. Oddly, several of the two-minute recaps are three minutes long; I guess ‘roughly-two-to-four-minute recaps’ just makes a less snappy name.

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Finally, the tale of two adorable Hollywood elitist types who had the guts to sack up and call the Palin selection for vice president what it is: a terrible joke.

First, Roger Ebert of all people writes a column calling her out as the American Idol candidate. What a perfect way to capture it:

I think I might be able to explain some of Sarah Palin’s appeal. She’s the “American Idol” candidate. Consider. What defines an “American Idol” finalist? They’re good-looking, work well on television, have a sunny personality, are fierce competitors, and so talented, why, they’re darned near the real thing. There’s a reason “American Idol” gets such high ratings. People identify with the contestants. They think, Hey, that could be me up there on that show!

Now, Roger Ebert is a pretty perceptive film critic, but I’ve never even heard of him writing a political piece before. He’s retired from his TV show now, so maybe he has more spare time to write. Or this election season has become so ridiculous he couldn’t help himself.

And to further the ridiculousness, an AP interview with Matt Damon, who uses and even more apt metaphor: a “really bad Disney movie”: 

She’s facing down Vladimir Putin using the folksy stuff she learned at the hockey rink… It’s absurd.

Little does he know that if they get elected, McCain passes away and she moves into the oval office, she’s already in talks with Air Bud to be the next VP (to coincide with the direct-to-video release of Air Bud: Country Furst?).