By
Eric Vilas-Boas,
a Vulture editor who covers streaming and animation.
He won a New York Press Club Award for "The 100 Sequences That Shaped Animation" in 2021.
One cold February morning this year, I climbed into my tiny, ever-dependable Prius C, pushed the start button, and the 13-year-old hybrid defied me in a way it never had before. Every light on the dash started blinking in a rapid, irregular rhythm before the whole machine just shut down. My battery was dead, my toddler was hungry, it was below freezing outside, and I was stranded on a sleepy street in western Queens with my closest jump start about an hour away. Disaster.
