Well, minimally. I saw it yesterday with my sister, and we loved it. More importantly for Flayrah, we saw that, although it is 92% non-anthropomorphic, there is one definite if non-talking anthropomorphic character in it: the little sloth, Belt, who serves as Guy’s belt. His body language makes him a fully intelligent character through pantomime.

The blue-furred, long-armed Punch Monkeys confronted by Grug are also screamingly anthropomorphic in their actions.

The Croods, by DreamWorks Animation, was released on March 22. It is a bit late to introduce a story about it now (we covered an art print released at Comic-Con), but there should be someplace on Flayrah to discuss the movie.

Ke$ha promotes teenage delinquency, one-night-stands, petty theft and vandalism, accompanied by fuzzy animal mascots, in her latest music video, C'Mon. [allie is wired]

Pets and their owners can breathe easier in the city of Windsor, and county of Essex, Ontario, as the Essex County Veterinary Association donated ten animal-friendly oxygen mask sets to the various fire departments in Windsor and the county on March 21.

The sets (which contain three pet masks, three sets of tubes, and a bag to carry them in) cost around CA$150 each.

Flayrah's accomplished reviewer Fred Patten has been invited to contribute to cartoon historian Jerry Beck's revitalized blog, Cartoon Research. He's since reviewed his own history, along with that of Osamu Tezuka, Astro Boy and Atomcat, and described how home video created anime fandom (including a brief mention of Mark Merlino and the C/FO).

Beck co-founded Cartoon Brew nine years ago, but was 'bought out' last month by co-editor Amid Amidi, who plans to "evolve the site while retaining its candid and authoritative voice". The move was discussed at Deadline Hollywood and Toon Zone; FLIP has a brief interview.

Fred was also recently named Fandom Guest of Honor at Rainfurrest 2013 for his extensive history within furry fandom. Their other guests are Soulscape, Temperance and Fox Amoore.

Demon of Undoing opens in the midst of battle, immediately establishing the Imkairans as a planetful of uncontrollably ferocious felinoids divided into constantly warring small feudal clans:

The warrior twisted his head, snarling at his commander over his shoulder, ears flat and eyes slitted with fury. In the brown furred hand the sword shifted toward Fenobar’s unprotected stomach, but then the glazed eyes focused on Fenobar’s white crest and sanity fought a return in the light green eyes. Sullenly the palecrest lowered his sword, shamed that he had so far forgotten himself. (p. 1)

Prince “wrong-handed” Fenobar is the protagonist, the Commander of the Temple Guard of the Kingdom of the Fen tribe of the Monghanirri clan. That sounds impressive, but the Temple Guard is a troop of old and maimed warriors, too experienced in battle to be ignored but too infirm to be frontline soldiers any longer.

Fenobar, by his royal birth and his savage spirit, cannot be ignored either, but his crippled left arm, twisted from birth, prevents him from becoming a real warrior. He has been shunted off into a ceremonial command that nobody takes seriously. For a savage Imkairan, subject to an instinctual battle lust, this is especially humiliating.

Riverdale, NY, Baen Books, June 1988, 308 pages, 0-671-65413-6, $3.50.

Currently touring the United Kingdom is I Was A Rat!, a stage play based on the book by British author Philip Pullman.

Pullman's 1999 book opens with elderly couple Bob and Joan answering a knock at their door, and finding a boy in a tattered page's uniform. When asked who he is, the boy can only tell them, "I was a rat". Having no children of their own, Bob and Joan take the boy in and name him Roger. They soon find he has distinctly ratty behaviour - he cannot eat with a spoon and, on his first night, chews his bed linen to shreds.

Bob and Joan attempt to find Roger's parents, but find the authorities disinterested and unhelpful. After Roger runs away during an examination by the Philosopher Royal, he gets exploited as a sideshow freak, used as an assistant to house-breaking, and eventually takes refuge in the sewers. With the local newspaper The Scourge feeding the hysteria, he is eventually caught and, as "the monster of the sewers", put on trial for his life.

I recently attended a performance at the Liverpool Playhouse. The stage play follows the book fairly faithfully; it was extremely well done, and I had so much fun watching it that I returned to catch it a second time before the production moved on to their next venue.

Some have called it "a beast that easily outruns the competition". It's smart, it's cute, it can fry two fish at once, and it's coming this summer – to your phone! [tip: diadexxus; best in HD]

The Snapdragon is an popular mobile system-on-chip designed for the ARM architecture. Many cell phones use one, including U.S. variants of the heavily-hyped Samsung Galaxy S4.

Related video: Even trolls need a break

Amid Amidi at the Cartoon Brew presents a true rarity: a 1947 unsold half-hour recording for a children’s radio show, “Sally in Hollywoodland”. Recorded on June 3, 1947, the pilot is about a little girl who falls asleep and dreams herself into an adventure with Walter Lantz’s famous Hollywood animal cartoon characters.

This episode stars Woody Woodpecker (voice of Theodore Von Eltz), Andy Panda (Sarah Brenner), Oswald Rabbit (June Foray), Wilbur Wolf (Billy Bletcher, who was the Big Bad Wolf in Disney’s 1933 Silly Symphony), and Wally Walrus (Herb Lytton). Amidi says that the recording was discovered by Randy Riddle, and that notes show that if the pilot had sold, Sally would have continued to have adventures with the Lantz characters, not other studios’.

Radio Comix, long-standing publisher of furry comics like Furrlough and Ebin & May, is running an Indiegogo campaign to raise cash to remain in business after discovering a massive tax shortfall:

Due to a horrible oversight on the part of our (now former) accountant, we now owe a staggering amount of back taxes. The total is truly shocking, and when I first discovered it, I was ill for days. I've been working for three months with a new accountant to get everything that wasn't filed taken care of, but filing does not equal paying and now not only do these freshly filed taxes have to be paid, but there are penalties due to the late filing. I'm a firm believer in filing and paying all my taxes, and finding out I was behind was my worst nightmare come true.

I have been working with the IRS to come up with a payment plan, but if we could get a large lump sum together to pay in at one time, it would be an enormous help!

Contributor perks available include wallpapers, comics, graphic novels, and lifetime subscriptions to future Radio Comix comic book releases.

Update: Four hours in, $1500 had been pledged; by the end of the evening it was $5364.

Update 2 (March 26): The lifetime subscriptions sold out this morning. Commissions by Stan Sakai were added; within hours, six of the five on offer were somehow claimed.

It starts light-heartedly enough. Take your basic haunted house story, only do it with dogs investigating a haunted doghouse. And slowly, gradually, the stories get darker.

Burden Hill would appear to be your everyday, quiet suburb, except... things... are starting to happen, and while the local humans haven't noticed anything yet, the local dogs certainly have.

Beasts of Burden is basically a series of comic books about canine paranormal investigation. (Plus a couple of cats.) The writing by Evan Dorkin manages to be fun and ominous at the same time, and he gives the dogs distinct personalities in a way that feels very believable. The artwork by Jill Thompson is rendered in excellent watercolors, and generates just the right atmosphere.

Furry auction site FurBuy has added a classified listings service, among other updates, positioning it as a "furry Craigslist". Listings so far include furry identification badges, a skunk suit for sale, and a request for a sewing partner. However, ongoing competition from social art sites has lead to a threat of closure later this year, reminiscent of those made over a decade ago.

Summerhill, probably a dog, is introduced at a dinner gathering as the others try to guess what he is:

‘I tell you,’ the ankylosauromorphic cyborg said in its fluid, polished, robotic voice, ‘he’s got to be some sort of wolf. Just on two legs, is all.’
Summerhill kept his ears perked and his mouth shut. He lifted his own glass of golden, bubbling something-or-other to his lips and took a sip, his eyes meeting the little girl’s for a moment of grateful acknowledgment.
‘Oh, please. Have you ever SEEN a wolf?’ asked the Crown Prince of the Akashic Realm, lines of disapproval appearing on his otherwise smooth, pale blue face. He and Summerhill had met earlier in the evening; the two shared a taste for fizzy beverages. ‘He’s far too small, and the colors are all wrong.’
The girl quietly begged pardon and broke away from the group. As she left, she offered Summerhill a tiny wave with her slender fingers, along with one final smile of sympathy and encouragement.
A being that looked like a pinkish cloud of gas with a self-contained thunderstorm rumbling all through itself chimed in. ‘No, I saw a wolf here aboard the ship just this morning.’ Blue tendrils of electricity crackled over its wispy form as it somehow created the sounds of speech. ‘He didn’t look anything like this.’ (p. 2)

Dallas, TX, Argyll Productions, January 2013, trade paperback $17.95 (285 pages).

The story has long been told of how the production of the 1969 TV special “The Pogo Special Birthday Special”, a collaboration between Pogo creator Walt Kelly and animator Chuck Jones, turned into a “Hollywood ain’t big enough for the both of us!” feud, that ended up with the two not talking to each other. Jones dismissed Kelly as “he thinks that he’s an animator just because he did about 20 seconds of the easiest animation in Dumbo twenty-five years ago.” (Kelly animated the silhouettes of the clowns carousing inside the circus tent.)

Now Amid Amidi reveals that Kelly was so displeased that he decided to create his own animated Pogo half-hour TV special, “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us”. But due to the difficulties of producing a half-hour of animation personally while in declining health, Kelly only completed a rough cut of thirteen minutes before he died in 1973.

Amidi has found that thirteen minutes, and presents it on the Cartoon Brew website. It may be unfinished, but it’s pure Kelly, from the drawings of the cartoon funny animals of the Okefenokee Swamp, to their animation, to Kelly performing all of the voices.

The Wolf Children Ame and Yuki (trailer 1 - 2) is a 2012 anime film directed by Mamoru Hosoda. Unlike his 2009 Summer Wars, this movie is very slow, introspective, and somewhat tragic. It might appeal to a small subset of furries, but its furry elements are underplayed and it may not have enough animal content to hook us as viewers.

Talking about this movie without spoiling it impossible because the story has no complexity. Basically, a single mom moves to the country and struggles to raise two werewolf kids; one embraces their wolf heritage, the other rejects it, and the family moves apart. That's it. (See Wikipedia for a more complete summary.)

The Furry Drama Show (FDS) completed its first season 2012-13, visiting six conventions: Wild Nights, RCFM, Oklacon, Fangcon, F3 and Furry Fiesta. As we start our new season, we continue to look for new performers to join us at these cons. If you cannot, we are also accepting videos of skits and music videos.