When Grandpa wakes from his nap, he sees the open gate, rushes out, grabs Peter, and pulls him back inside. Peter, despondent, stands and stares into space. Then, sensing something, he peels back a square of metal sheeting and sees the wolf on the side of the hill above the drainage pipe. The wolf stalks, he creeps, and the build-up is unbearable, but mayhem does eventually ensue. The wolf eats the goose whole. Peter despairs. The wolf stalks the cat, which runs up the tree. The crow jumps to safety and barely makes it.

Peter, properly pissed, grabs a net from inside the house, and after a series of hair-raising events, throws it on the wolf, who is immobilized. It's here that the hunters wander by in the nearby forest. Unfortunately, they're stoned. Now Grandpa shows up with a rifle, but Peter stays his hand. Cut to later that night as Peter and Grandpa drive into town towing a wooden crate with a barred window. Grandpa wants to make a deal for the wolf with the owner of a sporting goods store, but Peter's pride is stronger than his anger over the wolf eating his friend the goose, and he makes a brash decision.

This is going to make one helluva impression on animation industry people this year, because it was just iskoshi bit too late to make the Oscar noms last year and it'll be a crying shame if it doesn't qualify this year, so chances are you're going to see many pieces about this short, and its director, very soon. (You'll want to start with Andrew Osmond's piece for AWN from one year ago.) So I almost feel bad gabbing on too long about it here, when you should have stopped reading six paragraphs ago and called somebody you know about scoring a promo copy or getting into a screening -- but while you're pooling your Insider resources you should YouTube Templeton's earlier shorts Stanley and Dog (the former about a man who falls in love with a cabbage; the latter about an agoraphobe who kills the family dog and may have done worse).

The technical achievement in Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf is startling, the scope is immense, and I can only describe Suzie Templeton's adaptation as Righteous in that, if this story has been accumulating seven coats of Disneyfied cuteness in the last 70 years, this version cuts that to the quick and restores it to something Prokofiev could eminently respect. If he'd written his suite today, in an age of post-Glasnost uncertainty and graf artists and broken-down Ladas, and Suzie Templeton was the very first to adapt it to another medium, I'm sure he'd say she'd nailed it -- and all without a single word of dialogue.

Taylor Jessen is a writer living in Burbank. He just replaced his bike, and you can have the old broken one if you want -- it's out on the landing and it's not locked.