This may be the most enjoyable animated feature I’ve seen since Walt Disney died–a passionate ecological fable that combines more wit and wonder than the entire output of some animation studios. Basically a collaborative effort between Australians and Americans, directed by Bill Kroyer (a Disney-trained animator) from a script by Jim Cox based on the FernGully stories by Australian writer Diana Young, it benefits greatly from the voices of such actors as Robin Williams, Tim Curry, Samantha Mathis, Christian Slater, Grace Zabriskie, Cheech Marin, and Tommy Chong, as well as from a canny sense of how to use them....

The 26th Chicago International Film Festival moves into its second and final week with well over 60 programs to choose among. The range of selections, as usual, runs all the way from indispensable (Secret Love, Hidden Faces) to awful (The Mad Magician), from interesting and oddball (Vincent and Theo, Archangel, Recollections of the Yellow House) to slick and conventional (Superstar and Shaking the Tree). Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Is a bog a wetland? Look at one from a distance and you might not be certain. The surface is either flat or hummocky, and there are usually no puddles to be seen. Low shrubs and scattered tamarack and black spruce trees cover much of the ground. From a distance a bog can look as dry as a suburban lawn. Or is it? A bill–HR 1330–recently introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives by two congressmen from Louisiana says that even if you sink up to your chin in the icy waters of a bog, it is still not a wetland....

ORWELL DOWN AND OUT Now I’m sorry. Orwell turns out to be quite wonderful. I know, because I’ve been seeing big chunks of him onstage lately, at the Bailiwick Repertory–where, as if to educate fools like me, they’ve been turning Orwellian prose into strong, smart theater. Bailiwick produced Sir Peter Hall’s stage adaptation of Animal Farm last season, and then brought it back for an encore run this season. In addition, they’re currently offering a “companion piece”: a concert version of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, adapted by Bart DeLorenzo and performed on Animal Farm dark nights as Orwell Down and Out....

Hotel Industry Is Hooked on Suites Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the traveling businessperson (and the vacationing family as well), the suite hotel is an inviting option, offering a living room/bedroom combination at a price competitive with standard rates at most first-class hotels, according to Newmark. At Guest Quarters, a standard suite is $180 per night, and that includes a mini-bar, refrigerator, two telephones, a speaker phone, and two remote-control televisions....

This early experimental feature, slightly longer than an hour, by Chantal Akerman (1972), shot silently and brilliantly by Babette Mangolte, explores the corridors, lobby, elevators, and rooms of a cheap New York hotel. Occasionally the rooms’ solitary occupants are glimpsed, but this only increases the overall atmosphere of eerie isolation and quiet, and reveals perhaps more than any other Akerman film how central an influence Edward Hopper has had on her work....

For slick, uptown presentation and musical subtlety, look elsewhere: These musicians are among those who have been keeping the Maxwell Street crowds dancing on Sunday mornings for years. When they’re not playing the street, they work at places like the New Excuse Lounge (formerly Porter’s) on South Halsted. Ice Man Robinson employs a searing slide interspersed with fierce single-note leads and his characteristic muted-string plucking; meanwhile Dancin’ Perkins booms away on his ancient Fender bass, dancing, cavorting, and playing with one hand or behind his back–even twirling himself around his instrument as if it were a maypole....

MARY HAWLEY AND MATTHEW OWENS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The evening was divided into three parts, two solos and a duet. Hawley performed first, reading new poems as well as older ones from her book, Double Tongues. Her style is subtle, spare, delicate yet lethally direct. Hawley is a good reader, projecting beautifully (without a microphone) and maintaining the audience’s interest. One especially haunting poem, “La Judicial,” tells how Hawley witnessed the police in a waiting room in Veracruz, Mexico, dancing with one another, radio blaring, in order to distract people from the screams of prisoners being tortured in an adjoining room....

Lead Story In a memo released in October under the name of U.S. senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, Pell aide C.B. Scott Jones asked the Defense Department whether President Bush and his top aides were inserting a secret code word into their speeches about the Persian Gulf war. The word “Simone” supposedly could be heard by listening to the speeches backward. Jones, Pell’s “paranormal expert,” conceded that if the government intended no secret word, Pell’s finding would be “just another mystery in a new technology we are developing....

The art of quilting had its origins centuries ago in the temperate climates of Africa, India, and Iran. But it wasn’t until quilting reached cold New England in the 18th century that it really came into its own. Characteristics we typically associate with quilts–geometric shapes or lines of stitching that echo the patchwork–only developed as quilts started to be made in this country. Today most people consider quilting a folk art that belongs more to North America than to any other part of the world....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The same thing happened in the first school council election, too. Both times, an independent community representative came within a few votes of taking a seat–without, as Levinsohn accurately describes, any machine or carefully orchestrated and financed campaign effort. The first election, the distance was around 20 votes, this latest one just 4 votes. These results came from the spontaneous efforts of neighbors who care about the school....

Any new film by experimental filmmaker and artist Michael Snow is a major event, and this 41-minute “road” movie of shifting landscapes shot from the bottom of a truck, and accompanied by the sounds of a film audience, is no exception. The title apparently stems from the common identity of Snow, who drove the truck, and the audience watching the film. Judging from a first viewing, Seated Figures lacks the pristine excitement of Snow’s monumental camera movement trilogy of the late 60s and early 70s (Wavelength, Back and Forth, and La region centrale), but it is full of different kinds of suspense and surprises for spectators who are prepared to experience a painterly film without a story line but with a great deal of luscious Canadian landscape, seen at close range and in motion....

SPLATTER THEATRE Metraform at Annoyance Theatre Unfortunately, plot and character development are largely neglected. Which is a shame, because if there’s anything the Metraform actors are good at it’s creating strong, funny, original, multilayered characters at the snap of a finger. Less than 30 seconds after Matt Walsh enters, for example, he not only establishes that he’s the “class dick,” but also makes himself so annoying that we find ourselves looking forward to his gratuitous, bloody murder....

What started as a fortuitous booking a couple of years ago is beginning to look like a delightful annual ritual: celebrating the birthday of blues patriarch Sunnyland Slim by pairing his Delta-rooted piano traditionalism with the eclectic flamboyance of Dr. John. It’s a perfect if unlikely match: The 84-year-old Sunnyland’s wide-fingered chording and sparkling treble cascades support a voice that’s still one of the most remarkable in all of blues, despite recent health problems....

SYMPHONY CHAMBER SOLOISTS OF CHICAGO The impetus for the alliance came from the Art Institute’s president, James Wood, and the CSO’s Daniel Barenboim. Mary Sue Glosser, the museum’s lecturer who’s now in charge of the series, says, “In a series of this scope, we can closely examine music’s ties to the visual arts. Many composers have expressed admiration for certain painters and vice versa. But how did they influence each other?...

At the Jasper County Prairie Chicken Sanctuary, which is a little over 200 miles south of Chicago, 20 miles southeast of Effingham, and just northeast of the tiny town of Bogota, in the former redtop farming capital of the world, Scott Simpson is trying to save the last of Illinois’ prairie chickens. Prairie chickens are a fussy species, and that makes the effort to save them a matter of some subtlety....

Going from the Bulls to the Cubs was going from one end of the sports spectrum to the other. A winning team–especially a championship team–gives off a hum of activity, the players are happy and comfortable with one another, and difficult achievements therefore come easily. A losing team, on the other hand, is quiet and sullen, stuck in the doldrums. The players show up to do their jobs and constantly expect bad things to happen....

Jeanne Moreau, Joan Plowright, Julie Walters, and newcomer Lena Headey star in an enjoyable English comedy directed by Waris Hussein and set in Croydon, a straitlaced London suburb, in 1959. The story, adapted by Martin Sherman from Alice Thomas Ellis’s novel The Clothes in the Wardrobe, concerns a young woman (Headey) who finds herself engaged to a self-absorbed and insensitive local (David Threlfall) she couldn’t care less about. Her mother (Walters), prospective mother-in-law (Plowright), and everyone else in the vicinity somehow manage to dissuade her from backing out, and her only confidant proves to be Lili (Moreau), an unconventional, half-Egyptian friend of the family who turns up for the wedding and slowly but surely, using an arsenal of wiles, does what she can to set things right....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As an avid theatergoer and longtime “reader” of your publication, I am writing to point out a disturbing and ongoing trend evident among those charged with criticizing local theatrical productions and the work of the various professionals involved in local theater. While all Reader reviews include the words “in this production,” generally there is little if any mention made of a production’s technical aspects....

It was only four years ago that a group of north-side seniors struck a deal with the Illinois Masonic Medical Center, a deal heralded as a model for senior-citizen health care. As for Shriman’s group, they opened the White Crane Wellness Center in the second-floor banquet room of Ann Sather’s restaurant on Belmont. They’ve managed to keep their exercise classes going, but money’s tight. Without more contributions, they won’t be able to pay Rob Skeist, their director....