In filmmaking, circumstances create techniques, which in turn result in artistic innovation. Some of the most original independent films in recent decades—those of Joe Swanberg, for instance—have forged new modes of production out of economic and practical constraints, and these alternative practices have also given rise to original cinematic aesthetics. A new animated project, “Tux and Fanny,” does something similar in the realm of animation; lacking conventional modes of production or distribution (as too many independent filmmakers today do), its writer and director, Albert Birney, has devised his own ingenious homemade ones—and the results are as inspired and imaginative as the method. “Tux and Fanny” began as a series of seventy-nine micro-shorts, each about a minute long, posted on Instagram. It is realized mainly with a simple Atari-style color-field technique, which renders its action with the pixelated abstraction of Pac-Man figures. Together, the episodes amount to a feature film, which is now available to stream on Vimeo; it’s also available for purchase—as a VHS tape.

“Tux and Fanny” is no mere low-budget stunt; Birney is the co-director of “Sylvio,” the tale of a talented gorilla in Baltimore, which is one of the most gleefully imaginative homemade features of recent years (and which started as a Vine series). “Tux and Fanny” is similarly inventive, warm-hearted, speculative, and sweetly exquisite. Its monochrome protagonists are essentially humanoid gingerbread cookies, who move with a stark and jittery simplicity that conveys a similarly stark and frank emotionalism. The pink Tux speaks in a resonant bass voice; Fanny, who’s purple, speaks in higher, reedier tones; and both of them speak Russian throughout. (The movie is subtitled in English.) The feature is episodic, following Tux and Fanny, who share a small house and sleep in separate beds in one bedroom, through adventures that quickly veer toward the surreal and the whimsically macabre. Its tone brings to mind Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad” series of children’s books, though it’s not a children’s movie.

The action is launched when the friends find and adopt a black cat, which they name Sasha; Tux does so without hesitation, but Fanny worries that the stray will bring fleas into their home. That’s what happens (the insects are depicted with blunt humor), and their intrusion leads to discomfort, which leads to remedies, which lead to inconveniences, which lead to a calmly horrific mutilation, all of which the friends find a way to accommodate in the placid rounds of their daily lives—and even turn to their own modest advantage. In this regard, “Tux and Fanny” harks back to the temporary calamities of classic Looney Tunes, where catastrophic injuries are instantaneously overcome and the action continues. In Birney’s film, the catastrophes are no less dire—but how the characters cope with and repair the damage is a matter of meticulous drama.

The thought that goes into this work is brought out from behind the curtain and rendered in the movie’s blunt and trenchant dialogue (to which the subtitles lend a distinctive, graphic, and literary impact). Tux is philosophically speculative, delivering aphoristic riffs that reveal Kierkegaardian abysses in such daily trivialities as a campfire, and mini marshmallows in cocoa. Fanny is physically more capable, more practically active and self-aware, and also more immediately empathetic, to great dramatic moment. She often wonders about other lives and other modes of existence—and Birney conjures the inner lives of creatures and substances (birds and bugs, wood and water, and pixels themselves) that she imagines, launching the film into astonishing realms of visionary delight. (One of the most ingenious and moving moments involves the revelations afforded by a new pair of eyeglasses.)

The film’s idiosyncratic twists of plot give rise to ingenious stylistic inventions. For instance, when Fanny thinks that she has lost Tux and fashions herself a new Tux made of clay, Birney blends the pixel art of the protagonists’ world with fingerprinted Claymation (and the clay Tux brings a distinctive, melancholy tone to the tale as well). Elsewhere, Tux and Fanny’s leisurely wanderings to a nearby pond yield a choreographed chorus of singing ducks. Another stroll leads to a taxonomy of fantasy birds with names and appearances of comedic extravagance. Other outings involve an Icarus-like flight across the sun, a river journey with references to “Night of the Hunter,” dream sequences (including one that the friends share), and a variety of hallucinations (including drug-induced ones).These extravagant visions rely on a similarly extravagant range of animation techniques, involving cellophane and fur, hand-drawing, metallic sculptures, watercolors, and costumed live-action figures reminiscent of those in “Sylvio.”

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Birney’s direction, for all its giddy inventiveness, is also precise and emotionally calibrated. The characters’ motions and positioning offer sentimental pangs along with wonder. His closeups deliver plangent details that are both humanly intimate (small puddles of tears and reflections of campfires in the eyes) and endowed with a virtually painterly joy in nature (clouds, sky, trees, animals, insects, meteorological extremes, and imaginary constellations, rendered in boldly juxtaposed colors). It’s also a film of mysticism, magic, and private mythology; yet its range of moods and details, of tender inventions and phantasmagorical extravagances, are centered on the bedrock of an unshakable friendship that withstands dire circumstances and, against comically grim odds, endures.

The delights of “Tux and Fanny” are tinged with the unpleasant fact that it isn’t in commercial distribution—it was put out, as episodes, for free, and the feature itself is offered free as well. Its trio of executive producers includes Dan Schoenbrun and Vanessa McDonnell, who are also among the producers of the five-part anthology film “collective:unconscious,” from 2016, which was also put online for free (and had only a nominal, hardly publicized theatrical release). Despite its noncommercial availability, that movie reached the collective consciousness, albeit indirectly: its episode “Everybody Dies,” by Nuotama Frances Bodomo, was prominently included in Terence Nance’s HBO series “Random Acts of Flyness.” As for “Tux and Fanny,” its animation is far more imaginative and more inspired than the clangorous gyrations of last year’s Oscar winner, “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.” Without a theatrical release, “Tux and Fanny” can’t qualify for an Oscar (the Academy serves mainly to protect multiplexes and their movies against the competition), but I hope that it will find its rightfully exalted place in the company of viewers—and perhaps even critics—unswayed by the asterisks of studio filmmaking.

Even in the bad years, before the Boston Red Sox won the World Series, in 2004, and upended all the foundational bad-luck stories of the franchise, the smart take among Sox fans was that it wasn’t really Bill Buckner’s fault. Blame it—and the word “it” alone always sufficed—on a rogue’s gallery of pitchers (Roger Clemens or Calvin Schiraldi or Bob Stanley, take your pick), or on the manager, John McNamara. The cruel, late-inning crumbling by the Sox against the Mets, in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, which derailed a victory that would have given the Sox their first championship in sixty-eight years, was a true team effort. The score was already tied and good fortune clearly exhausted by the bottom of the tenth inning, when the Mets outfielder Mookie Wilson hit a meek dribbler down the first-base line that bounded not under Buckner’s glove, as many would later put it, but somehow, impossibly, around it and into right field, allowing Wilson’s teammate Ray Knight to score from second, winning the game for New York. Those wised-up Sox fans would then add that, even after all that, there was still another game for Boston to play—and blow a lead in—before the Series reached its dismal end.

But that’s a twisty story, and so, not right away but eventually, out of some combination of mental convenience, mediocre newspaper columns, mounting losses to the rival Yankees, and predictably lousy winters, the story in New England became the one that I got growing up, that Bill Fucking Buckner lost the 1986 World Series and then was chased into hiding in Idaho.

Neither part of the story was right. Buckner didn’t enter witness protection. He returned to the Red Sox for the 1987 season, following an offseason in which blame for the 1986 loss was spread around liberally, and during which Buckner himself suggested that Wilson might have been safe even if he had fielded the ball, since the pitcher at the time, Stanley, hadn’t covered first base fast enough. Buckner was let go midway through the ’87 season, but, after stints with the Angels and the Royals, he came back to Boston again, making the team in 1990, at the age of forty, after scratching his way onto the roster in spring training. “This is more satisfying than anything I’ve ever done in baseball,” he said at the time—hardly the words of a ruined man haunted by a single, irrevocable moment from his past.

Buckner did move to Idaho a few years after retiring from baseball, but this, like everything else about him, was both more and less complicated than the narrative that came to prevail. His departure from New England followed an altercation with a fan after a minor-league game in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where he was serving as a hitting instructor for the visiting team. He was leaving the ballpark when, as he told the Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, “Somebody asked for an autograph, and another guy said, ‘Don’t give him a ball, he’d just drop it anyway.’ I got to my truck to put my bag inside, and I started thinking about it. I went back and found out who said it, and I picked the guy up by the shirt collar.” This must have been where the exile story started: Buckner chased west by one wise-ass too many. He told Shaughnessy that he didn’t want his kids having to hear about ’86 anymore. And yet, a few years later, Buckner told the Globe that the tale of his self-imposed hermitude had been overblown: he had a ranch in Idaho, he liked it there, and he wasn’t hiding from anyone.

Bill Buckner died in Boise on Monday morning, of Lewy body dementia, at the age of sixty-nine. The news of his death has occasioned an airing of regret. Buckner had 2,715 career hits and twenty-two seasons in the majors; that should never have been subsumed by the black cloud of a single misplayed grounder, many people have noted. Mookie Wilson, who became friends and an occasional memorabilia-seller with Buckner, said that his former opponent “should not be defined by one play.” Also making the rounds during the past twenty-four hours is a clip from Opening Day at Fenway Park in 2008, when Buckner was invited to throw out the ceremonial first pitch. He takes a long walk from left field to the mound, wipes a few tears from his eyes, and then delivers a looping curve over the plate for a strike. (Afterward, he said, “In my heart I had to forgive the media, for what they put me and my family through.”) It was a moving moment, owing to Buckner’s grace at the center of the spectacle, but there was a whiff of self-satisfaction and stage-managed pathos on the part of the Red Sox organization and its fans, who were celebrating their second World Series victory in four years, and were at last successful enough to reckon with, and put to bed, an emblem of their former, sadder selves.

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It wasn’t the first time that Buckner had been hailed by the crowd in a much publicized return to Fenway. Eighteen years earlier, in 1990, in what would be his final Opening Day in the majors, he was announced in the lineup and greeted with a minute-long ovation. For David Nyhan, writing in the Globe the next day, the scene had been a kind of religious reckoning, “a day for Second Chances, if not Second Comings.” Nyhan went on, writing, “New England doesn’t forget. But New England forgives. You are us. We are you. Only by forgiving you do we forgive ourselves.” For as long as Sox fans had maligned him, there were others who relished their forgiveness of him, their accepting of an apology that he had never offered for a play that was not, in fact, some mystical or accursed happening but just the result of an unfortunate bounce.

The truth about baseball and its slow accumulations is more mundane than any of the stories—of failure, or of misunderstanding, or of redemption—that attached themselves to Buckner. For him, it was a mile of eye black and thousands of bags of ice and shredded knees, bickering with team executives about contracts and managers about playing time. It was appearing in a major-league game for the Dodgers at nineteen and winning a batting title with the Cubs at thirty-one. It was the great satisfaction not of being hailed by the fans on Opening Day, in 1990, but grinding to make the team in the first place. It was running the bases that season to leg out an unlikely inside-the-park home run, looking like “a suitcase falling downstairs,” as Roger Angell put it at the time. And it was being cut for good that June, finally too old to do it anymore.

And it was a cruel trick of the ball on a night in October in 1986, a trick made crueller because it yielded an image that so perfectly encapsulated the seeming sports tragedy that had unfolded for the Sox, which was irresistible, in its way. The legendary play-by-play man Vin Scully, announcing the game on television, said, “If one picture is worth a thousand words, you have seen about a million words.” He was talking about all that had transpired in the tenth inning, but he could have been talking just about Buckner, bending his busted knees, jabbing his glove to the ground and coming up empty, then turning his head as the ball went by. Scully made the comment after going silent for nearly two remarkable minutes, as the cameras cut from the Mets mobbing one another to fans screaming and the Red Sox moping out of the dugout. Scully knew what something astonishing looked like, and he knew when words couldn’t do it justice.

Tony Horwitz’s great-grandfather Isaac Moses Perski came to America from tsarist Russia in 1882, a penniless teen-ager, and one of the first things he bought in his new country was a book, an illustrated history of the Civil War. In 1965, he showed that book to his very little great-grandson. “Peering over his arm, I saw pen-and-ink soldiers hurtling up at me with bayonets,” Horwitz later wrote in The New Yorker. “I was six, Poppa Isaac a hundred and one.”

Horwitz, who died Monday, at the age of sixty, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, a former New Yorker staff writer, and a distinguished American historian with a singular voice, full of compassion and delight and wry observations and self-deprecating humor—layers that covered but never obscured his deep and abiding moral seriousness about the task of the historian as the conscience of a nation.

The author of “Baghdad Without a Map,” Horwitz undertook adventure. He reported on strikes. He covered the war in Iraq. He once retraced the ocean voyage of James Cook. But, most lastingly, he wrote about the Civil War and its tortured legacy of hatred and division, battles that never ended. Those pen-and-ink soldiers, in the pages of Horwitz’s many books, came to life in their descendants, champions of the Confederacy, modern-day Klansmen, anguished, angry, and haunted.

His book “Confederates in the Attic,” from 1998, shattered his readers’ understanding of the Civil War. When Horwitz and his wife, the novelist Geraldine Brooks, had a son and decided to take a break from their work as war correspondents, they moved to a house in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and Horwitz started spending his weekends with Civil War reënactors. The Confederacy, he reported, was alive and well, and as full of animus at the idea of equality as ever. Horwitz interviewed a Klanswoman at a gathering, a macramé-making grandmother, who told him about the test she’d had to take, full of tricky questions. “Like, if someone asks, ‘Why do we hate Jews?’ I didn’t know before, but I found out.” Horwitz then asked her why she wasn’t wearing her robe. “It’s a good look,” she said, but “the cleaning bills will kill you.”

Horwitz wasn’t the liberal tourist, laughing at hicks. He hated that stuff. That attic? That was his attic, the American attic. As a boy, he’d painted the walls of the attic of his family’s house with a re-creation of the Battle of Antietam. “The attic became my bedroom,” he wrote, “and each morning I woke to the sound of my father bounding up the attic stairs, blowing a mock bugle call through his fingers and shouting, ‘General, the troops await your command!’ ”

I first met Tony fifteen years ago, when he spent a year at Harvard, and he sat in on a class of mine. We’d meet for lunch and swap stories and take walks and talk books. He’d come by the house and tease my kids. The first time his family came for dinner, we played Fishy, Fishy, Cross My Ocean in the park, and he made an excellent shark. The kindest, gentlest, and most generous people are always the ones most fun to watch trying to be ferocious. He was like an uncle, the one with all the funniest stories. Not the uncle who says “Gosh, you’ve gotten big!” to the littlest kid but the uncle who brings chocolate and says, to that kid, “Eat all of this before your brothers get back and I won’t tell them I brought it.” Mostly, we e-mailed each other terrible jokes, because we both had boys who had a particular passion for really bad one-liners.

Horwitz reckoned with the legacy of the Civil War all his life, fearlessly, long before battles over Confederate monuments and the press’s fascination with the resurgence of white nationalism. He was the rare historian—the only historian I can think of—equally at home in the archive and in an interview, a dedicated scholar, a devoted journalist. He counted, among his heroes, John Brown, the subject of his masterly book “Midnight Rising,” from 2011. But I think he identified most with the subject of his last book, “Spying on the South,” Frederick Law Olmsted, who, on assignment for the Times, reported on the South in the eighteen-fifties, years before he became a landscape architect and designed Central Park. Horwitz retraced Olmsted’s steps, and redid his reporting, in Trump’s America, marvelling at what his “Fred” had seen, and what he hadn’t, and what’s changed, and what hasn’t. He’d send me dispatches from the road, full of despair and homesickness and dread. He’d struggled with writing the end of the book. He wanted to find something beautiful for the ending, and where, now, is beauty? A century and a half after the Civil War, twenty years after “Confederates in the Attic,” people hate one another as much as ever, hurtling tweets as barbed and blood-soaked as bayonets.

He went, in the end, to Central Park, to wander. He struck up a conversation with a sixth grader from Harlem, and asked him what he liked best about the park. “Going where I want,” the kid said. Tony said he thought the man who designed the park would like that, and the kid asked what his name was, and then the kid said, “Tell Fred he did good.”

Last week, when a doctored video of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, began circulating on Facebook, it seemed like it would only be a matter of time before it was removed. After all, just one day before, Facebook proudly announced that it had recently removed 2.2 billion fake accounts between January and March as part of its expanded efforts to curb the platform’s circulation of misinformation. The video, which was manipulated to make Pelosi seem drunk and confused, is not a particularly sophisticated fake. But it was convincing enough that countless commenters believed it to be true and sent it spinning through cyberspace. At one point, there were seventeen versions of the video online; various iterations had jumped to Twitter and YouTube, and one was picked up by Fox News. The Fox News clip was then posted on Twitter by President Trump. Within hours, a version of the doctored video had been viewed more than two million times.

The Pelosi video was reminiscent of one broadcast on Facebook, last June, just after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary for New York’s Fourteenth Congressional District. What appeared to be an interview between Ocasio-Cortez and Allie Stuckey, the host of the online political channel Conservative Review, which made the young, self-declared democratic socialist look foolish and uninformed, was, in fact, a cut-and-paste job: answers from a legitimate public-television interview with Ocasio-Cortez were paired with new questions posed by Stuckey which were designed for maximum humiliation. In less than twenty-four hours, the video was viewed more than a million times. When Facebook was asked to take it down, the company demurred, saying that the bogus interview did not violate its “community standards” because Stuckey told them that it was meant as satire and that Facebook does not police humor. Similarly, Facebook refused to remove the Pelosi video because, according to Monika Bickert, the company’s head of global policy management, it does not violate the company’s community standards, even though it is demonstrably false.

Facebook’s community standards are not regulations. They are not laws. They are arbitrary and fuzzy guidelines developed by employees of a private company that are then open to interpretation by people paid by that company, and enforced—or not—by other employees of that company. Such solipsism accounts for Bickert’s inability to give CNN’s Anderson Cooper a straight answer when he asked her if the company would take down a similarly doctored video of Donald Trump that made the President, a known teetotaler, appear to be inebriated. The correct response, if the company were to follow its reasoning for not removing the Pelosi video, should have been no. But because Facebook’s community standards are interpreted subjectively and applied inconsistently, Bickert did not, and could not, answer.

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How Facebook developed its roster of community standards is instructive. As Tim Sparapani, the company’s former director of public policy, told the “Frontline” journalist James Jacoby, “We took a very libertarian perspective here. We allowed people to speak. And we said, If you’re going to incite violence, that’s clearly out of bounds. We’re going to kick you off immediately. But we’re going to allow people to go right up to the edge and we’re going to allow other people to respond. We had to set up some ground rules. Basic decency, no nudity, and no violent or hateful speech. And after that, we felt some reluctance to interpose our value system on this worldwide community that was growing.”

Choosing to allow false information to circulate on Facebook is not just “interposing” the company’s value system on those who use its platform, it is actually imposing its value system on the culture at large. In Bickert’s conversation with Cooper, she continually fell back on her company’s commitment to keeping its users “safe,” by which she meant free from the threat of physical harm. For a company whose products have been used to incite genocide and other kinds of violence, this is a crucial, if not always successful, aim. But safety is not one dimensional; when a company that operates a platform with more than two billion users takes a value-free position on propaganda, ancillary perils and threats will follow.

Bickert also repeatedly pointed out to Cooper that the Pelosi video now contains a warning stating that fact-checkers have determined it to be untrue. But that, too, is untrue. Rather, it comes with a notice that says, “Before you share this content, you might want to know that there is additional reporting on this from PolitiFact, 20 Minutes, Factcheck.org, Lead Stories and Associated Press.” Bickert told Cooper, “We think it’s up to people to make an informed choice what to believe.” What she seems to mean is that viewers can decide for themselves if the fact-checkers are right, or if the determination that this is fake news is itself fake news. This suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of fact or the point of having fact-checkers in the first place.

Facebook is continually falling back on the premise that it is a social-media company and not a media company, meaning that its allegiance is to free expression rather than to the truth. This is disingenuous. Facebook calls a user’s main page a “news feed.” And forty-three per cent of American adults say that they get their news from Facebook, more than from any other social-media site. Indeed, last year, in its response to a lawsuit brought by Six4Three, a bikini app startup, for breach of contract, the company cast itself as a publisher, with editorial discretion to publish what it wants. As Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University Law School, told the Guardian at the time, “It’s politically expedient to deflect responsibility for making editorial judgements by claiming to be a platform. . . . But it makes editorial decisions all the time, and it’s making them more frequently.” Choosing not to remove the Pelosi video, for example, is an editorial decision.

A few months before the 2018 midterm elections, I asked Zac Moffatt, Mitt Romney’s digital director in 2012 and the C.E.O. of Targeted Victory, a Republican strategy firm that sometimes works with Facebook, what he expected to see in future elections. “I worry all the time about the ability of people to create video content that is not true in origin, and the distinction is almost impossible to make,” he said. “These are really very scary trends. That’s what I think about the most: How will you determine what’s real and what is not real? I mean it’s hard now, but when video can be faked to that degree, I find that very scary going into 2020.”

It should be no consolation that the Pelosi video did not achieve the level of sophistication anticipated by Moffat. What Facebook and Twitter (which has also refused to remove it) have done is to make it clear to anyone with malign intent that it’s fine to distort the truth on these platforms. They are sanctioning the creation of misinformation and injecting it into the public consciousness. Bickert told Cooper that after Facebook learned that the Pelosi video was a fake, it had “slowed down the virality.” In other words, it will continue to infect the culture.

Ayşegül Savaş reads her story from the June 3, 2019, issue of the magazine. Savaş is a Turkish writer who lives in Paris and teaches at the Sorbonne. Her first novel, “Walking on the Ceiling,” was published in April.