Alexander Stuart

A week or so back, our five year old daughter and I were searching through Netflix for a nature documentary to watch when we chanced upon The Crimson Wing: Mystery of the Flamingos.  We started watching and were quickly entranced not just by the flamingos themselves, but by the extraordinary nature of the cinematography and the astonishingly vivid colors of these curious pink birds (scientists still do not know for sure why they often stand on one leg: perhaps to conserve heat in cold water, although they do it in warm water, too) set against the deep pure blues of the water and sky of Tanzania's Lake Natron.   When the film ended - after a beautiful and moving time spent getting to know these birds' lives, much as you do in the widely acclaimed, Oscar-nominated French documentary Winged Migration (a must-see, as is The Crimson Wing ) - I noticed that one of the producers was an old friend, Paul Webster , with whom I worked on The War Zone an

The crew from Oscar's Oasis. My children and their best friend have just introduced me to a cartoon show they all adore, Oscar's Oasis (available to stream on Netflix ) - a French-South Korean series of very distinctive shorts that riff on the frenetic pace, ambience and non-verbal humor of Chuck Jones' classic Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons , but bring a whole new energy and contemporary rhythm to the always-chaotic and hilarious proceedings. Oscar from Oscar's Oasis. As in the Roadrunner cartoons, food (and water or other refreshment) is the focus here.  The setting is a desert - drawn, as Wikipedia points out, from elements of the Sahara, Kalahari and North American deserts . As Oscar the lizard struggles to find and consume desperately-needed vittles, he is thwarted - and very occasionally assisted for a brief time - by a chaotic, equally determined trio consisting of Popy, a fennec fox, Buck, a vulture, and Harchi, a hyena, whose com