The 2024 Ursa Major Awards are open for voting, from Friday March 21 to Saturday April 19! You can go to the voting page to request a voting key.

The Awards may be changing the way they do things - If you're interested in offering ideas or suggestions, please contact Rowdy! In other news, the Ursas are now on Blusky, and they've released a temporary statement about AI/LLM content.

The 2024 nominees are...

"We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day."
-Chikn Nuggit, "An episode made for Tik Tok in case the app gets banned for real"

"I missed."
-Pepé Le Pew, "For Scent-imental Reasons"

Animation, at least in America, feels a bit weird right now. Maybe a bit unhealthy, but not in a "sick and dying" kind of way, but in a "your diet is messed up" kind of way. My most recent review besides this one is Flow, a micro-budget independent movie from Latvia made with Blender, while The Day the Earth Blew Up is the latest iteration of major studio Warner Bros.'s most famous IP, featuring marketable characters older than World War II. And yet, somehow, the former review feels like an unnecessary noting of something everyone was already aware of anyway, while this review feels more like a spotlight on a small unknown that deserves a wider audience.

Yes you read that right, a real actual bill was introduced in the state of Texas, which bans "Non-Human Behavior" in Texas schools. It includes students behaving like animals such as making meowing noises, wearing tails, animal consumes and much more. Non-Human Behavior is defined within such bill.

The bill also intents to make it a form of a child abuse to encourage said behavior. This means that when a parent encourages a child to believe that it is socially acceptable to engage in such Non-Human Behavior for example, it would become a form of "abuse".

SECTION 5. Subdivision 261.001(1), Family Code, is amended to
read as follows:

(1) "Abuse" includes the following acts or omissions by a person:
(A) mental or emotional injury to a child that results in an observable and material impairment in the child's growth, development, or psychological functioning, including, in an education setting, allowing or encouraging the child to develop a dependence on or a belief that non-human behaviors are societally acceptable;

bold is emphasizing the change in text proposed by amendment

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.