Anthro New England, or ANE, held its tenth annual convention, and its ninth in-person one, at the Westin Boston Seaport District hotel in Boston, Massachusetts in mid January. The convention was sandwiched between the Hanover Insurance Group’s National Sales Meeting (ended Thursday) and a MathWorks event (Monday onwards).

Fresh back from a convention, still dealing with the concrud, but welcome all to an amazing packed episode filled with good news from the furry fandom! Covering not just the charity numbers with a highlight of Nordic Fuzzcon, but also a lovely interview with Chester the Geroo. I mean, not only does this little critter have the voice of an angel... he sings operas— in fursuit. But first the charities!

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

It's Steam Next Fest time, which means Gaming Furever is here to bring you an exhaustive list of animal and furry games from the GF February 2025 version! We've compiled as many games as we could find with animals and/or anthropomorphic characters featured in them! Be sure to let us know of any others you find!

We have an actively updated Furry & Animal Games & Developers List over at @GamingFurever that you can follow and get constant updates for lots of indie titles with TONS of lovely furry characters! (We're working on a Bluesky version!)

If you're a developer of any of these games, feel free to hit us up on email over on our Contact Us page!

There are over 150 games to peruse this time around! Enjoy!

"'Cause the good old days weren't always good
And tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems"
-- Billy Joel, "Keeping The Faith"

I would submit that the ways in which we use our oh-so-superior creative tools nowadays, from spellcheck to AI, reveals far more tolerance for the past than we'd care to admit. All across social media you'll find more "icebergs", "rank" lists, and things "you didn't notice" than you can shake a VR trigger at. Proof springs eternal, oddly enough within the very works of art that are cranked out. This is certainly evident in the comics reviewed below (Scrapper and The Ruff and Reddy Show), which, to beg your pardon, are more analog than digital in nature.

Three reviews today, starting with the trailers for:

The first two can be skipped, and the third is a maybe.

It’s time for the third annual review of furry shorts released the prior year. In these I go through the previous year’s released animation shorts released, typically on YouTube, to see which ones stood out to me. I will note however that this year really was all kill and no fill on the recommendation list. I’m glad to see that there are so many passionate fans finding good content out there and the improvement over all.

I will admit I did miss a bit of the “what the heck did I just watch” surprises for this year. Hopefully things don’t get too sterile. But when it comes to short stories worth a watch there is no shortage of goodness this year.

So without further ado, let’s continue.

(Prior Years: 2023, 2022)

The Ursa Major Awards has opened nominations for the best furry content of 2024! Anyone can nominate works, with nomination phase going from February 1 to the end of February 28, 2025.

After the nomination phase has closed, there will a voting phase (Ursa website doesn’t say when, but probably will start in mid-March).

Hello! And welcome to the January edition of Digging Up Positivity, from this year on we are aiming to have a new video every first Saturday of the month featuring amazing charity results from the furry fandom, wholesome animation and animal news and a special guest! This month we are having an interview with Maying from Maying Fantasy Creations.

And trust me when I say, we can use some positive news this year, now more than ever. So here are the charities, starting with a little update from last year from the Furry Charity Index.

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

Welcome to my top ten list of movies for 2024. It's pretty self explanatory, and I've explained "the rules" plenty of times in the past, but I think I should explain one qualification for what constitutes a "2024" movie for my list, as it applies to one movie this year and has caused confusion in the past. Basically, I'm going by theatrical release, not festival premiere, like IMDB does.

Other than that, just a reminder that this isn't supposed to be a specifically furry list, even if this is a furry site, but I will award a Best Furry Movie, with this year going to The Wild Robot. At the start of the decade, this had a pretty high correlation with the Ursa Major Award for Best Anthropomorphic Motion Picture, with victories for Wolfwalkers and Raya and the Last Dragon, but in the last two years, I seem to have lost my short status as furry middlebrow tastemaker, as Turning Red lost to Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 lost to Nimona. All four of my picks for Best Furry Movie also ended up being my number one pick those four years, as well (spoilers for this year's list?). I also, just for fun, as a fox fan, give out a Cutest Vixen Award, and this year that goes to Zhen from Kung Fu Panda 4. In less furry accolades, I do sometimes list a movie from the previous year that might have made the list if I'd seen it before publication (not that this is a correction) and for 2023 I'll say The Holdovers was pretty good.

Sirocco and the Kingdom of Winds (trailer) is a 2D children's animated fantasy film, a Franco-Belgian production released in 2023, directed by Benoît Chieux who co-wrote it with Alain Gagnol. Imdb rates it 7/10.

Carmen and Juliette are sisters, whose mother drops them off with her friend Agnes to babysit for a day. Agnes has forgotten they'd be coming, and asks if they can be quiet for a half-hour while she takes a much-needed nap. She's the author of a long-running book series called Sirocco, and had been staying up all night writing.

Unable to sit still, Juliette rifles through one of Agnes' books, weird stuff happens, and the sisters end up in the world of the book, transformed into cats. After Juliette gets them in trouble with the local mayor, they embark on a quest with an avian opera singer named Selma to find the elusive Sirocco, a mysterious, reclusive, and mercurial sorceror.

A janitor finds himself on the night shift as a desperate CEO presses for his employees to work later into the dark for the week. This would normally just be an annoying inconvenience, but for Kyle the janitor, there are far worse implications to this situation as in the darkness of night, the humble cleaner becomes a bloodthirsty werewolf. As the head of security, Daryl, starts to become wary of the presence of the beast and becomes obsessed with bringing him down, will our precariously employed wolf be able to clean up the messes assigned to him and not create any new ones caused by satisfying his carnivorous appetite? The hunt is on.

The game’s premise is quite simple, and the game is short, which is probably why it is offered for no cost on Steam. When I streamed the game I was able to beat it in about an hour, and subsequently was able to replay the pre-designed levels for each day to lower my times and be as pacifistic as possible. It took me one additional hour to get all the visible accolades.

December was a quiet month. Happy New Year everyone! Several Flayrah articles have been getting an unusual number of 5-star votes lately. Even if our traffic increased, that's still an unlikely voting distribution, so there may be some kind of bot at work. Meanwhile, our contributors for this month are dronon and Rakuen Growlithe.

Rakuen Growlithe: Despite a lack of scientific justification (in fact, it's against the advice of conservationists), the EU is reducing protections for wolves.

dronon: Furry artist Richard Bartrop has passed away. (FA page.)

dronon: Trailer for the Latin American animated film Dalia and the Red Book.

dronon: There's an Okami game sequel in the works!

Rakuen Growlithe: The gene responsible for ginger coat colour in cats has recently been discovered. It is located on the X chromosome which explains why it is more likely in male (XY) cats.

After tallying up the charities collected by conventions and streams for 2024, furriers came together to raise $1,953,149.29. The breakdown for the causes can be found below:

• LGBTQ+ Welfare: $299,619.71 (15.34%)
• Animal Welfare: $1,108,623.81 (56.76%)
• General Humanitarian Welfare: $544,905.77 (27.9%)

Spreadsheet of the breakdown can be found here.