On January 10th SoFurry released a post indicating that they are back online for the first time since early July of 2025. During this downtime they had moved servers and finalized updating so that the new Beta version will now fully replace the original style of the site. The beta will remain in place until bugs are fleshed out with the public transition.

The line for badge pickup at last year’s ANE on Thursday night. (Flayrah/Eberra Wolf)

Anthro New England will be capping the fursuit photo and has been in need of staffers to control lines. Announced the other night on a new page on their website, the convention said the photo will be capped to 800 fursuiters and be moved to Friday instead of the traditional Saturday. Throughout the past few weeks, the convention has also repeatedly asked for staffers, especially ones to work in line control.

Furry literature features no shortage of smaller folk standing up for their own existence. Watership Down, Mrs. Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH, or some of you may even recall The Roquefort Gang from its animated appearance on CBS Storybreak. It’s a safe bet that these works, and so many like these, inspired David Petersen in the creation of Mouse Guard, which heads into its 20th Anniversary this year.

Contributors this month include 2cross2affliction, dronon, earthfurst, EberraWolf, and Sonious.

Oh man, 2025 surely has been a year. But, a lot of critters from the furry fandom has been doing their otterly best to make this world a better place. Some events with charities are known far and wide like our virtual friends from Furality raising over $100,000 dollars for the Center, or the various teams raising money for ALS in honour of Dogbomb. However there are so many more, from Chile to Taiwan, from South Africa to Belgium. Together with a small team of diggers and critters who submitted charities we ventured all over the world to check them out, resulting in this years’ Furry Charity Index.

Before we start venturing all over the world, let’s start with a few numbers I kept on being asked for. What kind of causes do we as a fandom support? We have a couple of main categories:

• 15.09% went to LGBTQ related charities
• 29.07% went to humanitarian efforts
• 55.84% went to animal welfare charities

And the final numbers with the difference from last year I will share with you after this wonderful list. Together with the people who made all of this possible. But for now, come travel with us!

[List of Charity events for 2025]

Ernest and Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia (trailer, pronounced "Gibberish-ia") is an 80-minute 2D animated children's film from 2022, a sequel to a 2012 film previously reviewed on Flayrah. They're part of a larger franchise based on a book series, that later got a TV series and a couple of specials.

Originally produced in France, it's been dubbed into English by GKids, however this new film has a completely different set of directors and writers. The producers and studios remained largely the same. In French the title was Ernest et Célestine: Le voyage en Charabie, based on the French word "charabia" that means gibberish or gobbledygook.

You can watch this film without having seen the first one! Ernest is a grumpy, kind-hearted musician (a bear), who adoped Celestine (a young mouse), despite bears and mice not typically getting along. The story begins with Ernest waking from his long winter sleep, when Celestine accidentally breaks his prized violin. Trying to make things right, she embarks on a journey to Ernest's hometown to get it repaired. In panic, Ernest chases after her, and they arrive in Gibberitia together.

Members of the furry fandom on the social media site Twitter (or X if you're feeling mean) have chosen Pawbert Lynxley of Zootopia 2 as the recipient of the 2025 Furry of the Year Award. However, the choice has not been without some contreversy, as there is a strong contingent of fans of the bat character Sonar from the episodic video game Dispatch are also claiming the prize.

Meanwhile, other Twitter furries, noting a lack of a similar "award" for female characters, have offered up their take on the last nine years for the other gender. Though the 2025 pick, Kitty Kat of The Bad Guys 2, is much less contreversial than the male pick, there has been much less agreement on who the previous years' recipients should be.

Now, let's back up a minute, and point out that there is no such thing as the Furry of the Year Award. The male version started out as sort of joke response to the popularity of the character Nick Wilde from the original Zootopia, but didn't really take off until two years later, when the character of Haida from the anime Aggretsuko became popular enough that even the American dub's voice actor for the character, Ben Diskin, took notice. Since then, various people have offered up their choice for "furry of the year", and eventually a consensus has been more or less reached, despite no vote taking place or jury meeting to decide.

What an enormously strange but wonderful year it has been! Welcome to the last episode of 2025! This episode we have:

• A wonderful interview with furry musician Cosmik with a K
• Animation news, how Zootopia 2 shattered all expectations, and how you can get one of those shiny Lorcana Cards!
• And of course, a whole bunch of charities

So...lets start with those!

Chickenhare and the Hamster of Darkness (trailer) is a 90-minute 3D kids animated adventure-comedy film. Released in 2022, it's important to note that this is an nWave Studios producion, a Belgian company whose output since 2008 has consistently ranged from "awful" to "thoroughly meh".

It's rare for their average IMDB score to go higher than 6 out of 10. This one was directed by Benjamin Mousquet and Ben Stassen, written by Dave Collard, and was very loosely inspired from graphic novels by Chris Grine.

I think Chickenhare has been the studio's... "best" work so far, but that's not saying much. Their second-best would probably be either The House of Magic (2013) or Son of Bigfoot (2018).

What I find fascinating about Chickenhare is that it's just on the edge of being okay. Most of its elements use well-worn tropes that you typically get in kids films, but other things are... different. Cheerfully absurd. It's not taking itself entirely seriously. It's solidly aimed at a young audience - but there's this odd, subtle undercurrent that only adults might notice, when they're not being bored. It's really difficult to put into words.

Contributors this month include 2cross2affliction, dronon, earthfurst, EberraWolf, and Rakuen Growlithe.

Ringer, a German shepherd fursuit at MFF 2024. Apparel like this would not be allowed at MFF 2025, says the convention. (Photo by Coastal Kangaroo, via Furtrack.)

Midwest FurFest 2025 kicks off this week, and many furs are understandably concerned about the presence of federal immigration agents so close to the convention. The notorious Broadview Detention Center is just over seven and a half miles from the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center, that MFF has called home since 2019.

MFF has been in the town of Rosemont, IL, for a decade and a half, which is a straight shot north from Broadview, IL. Anti-immigrant operations in the Chicago metro area are still ongoing, and the Chicago Tribune has written a great summary on what's been happening these last few months regarding actions taken.

MFF's PR director Kuna declined to share if the convention has a plan to respond to the possible presence of federal immigration officers in the area. The likelihood of that happening is low, though.

"Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was the most disappointing thing since my son."
- Mr. Plinkett

"Zootopia is definitely better than one of the most despised movies of the last decade!"
-some guy

Since we only had five reviews of the first Zootopia movie, you think not much else could be said about it, but, actually, it's been almost a decade, and Disney movies collect bad faith readings like Flayrah collects Zootopia reviews, and I'd like to address a few of those.

First, starting small, there's the "what do the predators eat?" thing which for some reason you still see bandied about like that's a clever observation, despite the movie's climax hinging the main predator character carrying a snack with him. Turns out, they eat food. Moving on, people like to complain about "copaganda", but, honestly, even if you accept all cops are bad, they have jobs that put them in dramatic situations regularly, so people are going to tell stories about them. That, and I've recently seen complaints that the Godfather parody glorifies criminals, so tie goes to the movie. The big one is the assertion that the main metaphor equates specific races (usually African American or black) with predatory species, when the metaphor is about minorities in general, and the movie does not specifically code most characters racially (though you could possibly argue the lead characters are pretty white-coded). An ironically bad faith defense here is that, when Disney racially codes an animal character, it's very noticeable, though they've mostly cut that out (mostly). Which brings me to the final complaint against Zootopia, which is that it is a Disney movie, and to that, all I can say is, well, nobody's perfect.

Zootopia 2 is the sequel to Zootopia, which makes sense. (The movies are also known as Zootropolis in certain regions, which makes less sense.)

Mahavatar Narsimha (clip) is the first in an intended series of 3D animated films from India, with the goal of telling the stories of the ten avatars of Vishnu. Released in 2025, it's directed by Ashwin Kumar, written by Jayapurna Das, and produced by Kleem Productions.

First and foremost, this is a religious film that takes its spiritual roots from Hindu mythology pretty seriously. It clocks in at over two hours long, and honestly I didn't have the patience to watch it from start to finish. I don't think I can objectively review such a film. I don't know the mythology, the religion, the symbolism or the culture that it's based upon.

It's struck a strong chord in India, becoming its highest-grossing domestic animated film in less than two weeks! So that's a positive sign. Whether you should try watching it - I can't say. This review will be a short summary that points out the anthropomorphic beings that appear.

Goldbeak (trailer) is a 90-minute 3D animated kids film. Although it came out in China in 2021 (original title: 老鹰抓小鸡), it's taken an unusually long time to get distributed, sometimes pretending that its year of release is more recent. It was produced by Liang Zi Film and Nigel W. Tierney, directed by Tierney and Dong Long, and written by Robert N. Skir, Jeff Sloniker, and Vivian Yoon.

In a world of mildly anthropomorphized birds, Goldbeak is an orphaned eagle who's raised by chickens in a rural village. He wants to fly, but most of the villagers don't help. They treat him as an outsider and eventually kick him out. Accompanied by his adoptive sister Ratchet (a gadgeteer genius), he makes the journey to the capital, the creatively-named Avian City.

Along the way he finds a mentor hermit who teaches him to fly. It turns out that Goldbeak is the long-lost nephew of the city's mayor. Then he wants to join the Eagle Scouts, an elite flying squad, but their leading member hates his guts. The mayor turns out to have sinister plans...

While the Western public is debating the rights and recognition of furry communities at the level of government politicians, the official power structure of the Internal Troops has created a real furry comics with direct government support. The first chapter of the three chapter saga of "Lesguardia" was released on June 2, 2022. This first chapter is entitled "Attack of the Pyros." Each chapter consists of thirty pages of narration about the work of the "Lesguardia" organization, which investigates the case of the "pyros" who are causing chaos in the city with their advanced technology. All of this is covered both from the perspective of the main characters and from the perspective of a squirrel reporter named Olga Orekhovna, who is also the news anchor for the fictional city of Dubrava.

To better understand the uniqueness of this comic, it is important to step back and consider the context. Since 2016, Russia has been home to the Rosgvardia, a military organization tasked with addressing internal unrest and urban protests. The meetings of furry fans for this government organization are also another goal, as any unauthorized gathering in urban areas without their permission is a direct violation of the law. This is why the furry community in Russia does not like the Russian National Guard, as they have banned them from gathering outdoors and even from walking together in the city. However, this dislike is not mutual, and as a result, a good furry comic book was created by the Russian National Guard.