Flash Illuminations Animation

At the website Flash Illuminations there's a lot of cool stuff not to mention cool animations. I'm primarily focusing on the butterfly section. In this section, the first thing you see after it finishes loading is a little caterpillar that appears 3-d and creeps up closer to the viewer. I thought this was the cutest thing, but that's my opinion. I was very interested in the 3-d look because usually I see a lot of two dementional cartoons and bitmaps when using flash. The simple process of using lighting effects and movement gives the little caterpillar some life that makes the viewer think of him as a real little caterpillar (even though he was still cartoon-like). After the little green guy came up to the screen, he became a pupa, which I wasn't too impressed with, and then into a butterfly that flew around the screen with other objects appearing and disappearing.
The interactive portion was quite interesting also. There are three categories to chose from and then subcatigories inside them. If you click on the anatomy section it points out the parts of a butterfly by using an animated butterfly that rotates and moves to show the part that you selected. In the environment section, little movies of real butterfly are shown. These movies include start and stop buttons along with a pause button. Also, in this interactive portion, I noticed that when loading some areas, there is an outline of a butterfly that gradually fills in as the movie is loading. I thought that was cute and clever and definitely more creative than just a bar that grows across your screen. I think it gives it some character. Overall I think that this section of the website was quite interesting. Despite the fact that everything was short, it kept my interest and had great art appeal. I think I'm going to check it out again soon.