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We’re proud to be able to feature “The Forest in Winter,” a genuinely mesmerizing short from Jake Portman and Bill Sneed. We suggest you first watch it, then come back here and read what Sneed told us the film is about.

Essentially, Sneed says, the team wanted to contrast “an old Russian style of animation” with a flashier genre, so they decided on commercial Japanese art. “A lot of our motivation was an intention to create an awkward, forced element of product placement, but mostly it was an excuse to play around with different styles and means of storytelling,” Sneed writes. He also credits Charlie Short, who wrote the script and the original narration, which was translated into Russian and Japanese — and then those poor translations were poured back into English.

Open Salon interview.

A struggling Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Penn., went nuclear Wednesday, with an ad that tries to ally challenger Bob Casey with North Korea and China. Ah, the acrid smell of desperation in the weeks before a congressional election! Be prepared for even more of these terror-filled spots in these glorious final days of Campaign 2006, all of which carry a little DNA from the mother of all scare ads: The 1964 Lyndon Johnson “Daisy Girl” ad against Barry Goldwater (bottom ad, below).

From Michael Scherer’s piece today: “The GOP seems to believe that Ford’s appeal to its most reliable voters is working. In recent days, the Republican National Committee has attempted to reverse the troubling polls in Tennessee with a television ad that both attacks Ford’s religious credentials and invokes that old standby of American politics, racial fear.”

This National Republican Senatorial Committee ad against Harold Ford sports an early mention of a Playboy connection that the party hopes will rile Christians against Ford.

Salon’s piece on Rep. Harold Ford Jr.’s senate campaign spotlights his appeal to churchgoers, as in the TV spot below.