Furality finished its eighth gathering on the second weekend of June 2024. When the VRChat-based congregation had finished it had shown continual growth hitting 21,000 attendees registered and raising over $42,269 for charity. It has shown that in spite of the naysayers who thought that online only furry events would die down in the wake of waning 2020 pandemic restrictions, online conventions held in virtual reality spaces show no signs of slowing and are now clearly a new staple in fandom activities.

Being in attendance myself this year, I go over the strengths and weaknesses that these events have over their real-world counterparts. The article will also cover some highlights of the events such as the eclipse and firework show. In short, what we find is that while Furality has taken events and formats inspired by in-person conventions, it is clearly an entirely different beast.

Before we even begin, what is some of y'all's problem with Chris Pratt as a voice actor?

He's a fine actor who can do comedy sidekick (his breakout role in the sitcom Parks and Recreation), character actor in supporting role (he had small but important roles in Best Picture nominees three years in row with Moneyball, Zero Dark Thirty and Her), full on movie star (he's great in Guardians of the Galaxy and, remember, I liked Jurassic World), and, yes, voice actor (The Lego Movie). And by all accounts he's a nice guy people like working with, and that does matter. He's hardly the only guy who does a lot of voice work, either. Since theaters like to play ten trailers before a movie before, I was able to notice a lack of Chris Pratt (or another personal favorite who people like to complain about online, Awkwafina), but not Keegan-Michael Key, who is way more ubiquitous as Pratt in voice work, and is often even in the same movie as both Pratt and Awkwafina, but who never gets this sort of backlash when cast. And, not to be too mean to Key, who I mostly like, but I've already noted Pratt is actually a pretty versatile actor and Awkwafina has a Golden Globe, while Key is the half of Key & Peele that is starting to look like he got carried by the other half. I'm sure he'll actually be great as Bumblebee, though.

But, to bring the movie I'm supposed to be reviewing into the picture, I really do not get why people were upset Chris Pratt was cast as Garfield, because, come on, it's freaking Garfield. Bill Murray voiced the role in 2004, and Murray went on to bash the movie in his cameo playing himself in 2009's Zombieland, picking it as his life's greatest regret. On the basis of that, if you don't like Chris Pratt, you should be thrilled he got the role! Garfield's creator, Jim Davis, has always been a pretty open about the commercial aspirations of the character. I mean, kind of like Keegan-Michael Key, I like the character fine, but he barely stands out as a comic strip and Saturday morning cartoon star, mediums that are known for producing mostly safe, crowd-pleasing pablum. And that's basically this movie.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is the fourth movie in the current continuity of the Planet of the Apes series of movies, and the tenth overall. It follows the adventures of intelligent chimp Noa (performed with motion capture technology by Owen Teague) some generations after the last movie, War for the Planet of the Apes. Directed by Wes Ball, it features a variety of apes, including gorillas and orangutans in addition to chimps (gibbons are also mentioned in passing).

It begins with a quick prologue to the funeral of Caesar, the ape protagonist of the previous trilogy of movies. I felt like those movies came to a definitive end with the last movie; Kingdom is less a direct sequel to War and more the start of a new story set in the same world, so it feels a bit like the proverbial cake that you can both have and eat, too, as far as previous trilogy endings are concerned.

Robot Dreams (trailer) is a 102-minute animated film released in December 2023, made by Arcadia, Lokiz and other studios. Based on a 2007 graphic novel (Amazon US - UK - Spanish edition) by Sara Varon, this Spanish-French production was written and directed by Pablo Berger, who had never worked in animation before, so he collaborated closely with art director José Luis Ágreda and storyboard artist Maca Gil for a year and a half to plan the project. It worked out really well!

Two neat things: it's a 2D film in an overbearingly 3D market, and there's no dialog. It takes place in a slightly alternative version of New York City in 1984, a funny-animal one. The main character, "Dog", lives in a Manhattan apartment. He's extremely lonely. One day he sees a TV ad for robot friends, so he orders one; after putting it together - he's not lonely anymore! Aside from this modern leap in artificial intelligence and robotics, the film is as early-80s as it gets: boomboxes, cassettes, VCRs, and Walkmen.

Furry Weekend Atlanta continues its monstrous growth, smashing its prior record with a total of 15,021 attendees and raising $100,000 for their charity of Lost-n-Found Youth. This has solidified its position in the top three, and for the time being surpasses Anthrocon – that had a 2023 attendance of 13,641 – making FWA, for the next few months, the world's second-largest in-person furry convention.

The increase this year from last was 4,693 attendees. For perspective, the total attendance of Anthro New England this year was 4,482. So staff at the Atlanta convention this year had to take care of the total they handled in 2023, plus an Anthro New England-sized convention at the same time in 2024. The gathering has never desired further volunteers more.

It was also my first year in attendance, so I wanted to go over my experiences, the challenges, and the strengths of the convention.

"I don't get the joke. Is it dirty, or what?"
-Gerald Ford, 38th President of the United States of America (attributed)

You guys remember Bitter Lake?

Way back in the before times, when dinosaurs roamed the land, there was a tiny, micro-budget, barely feature-length "fan-movie" known as Bitter Lake, featuring a cast entirely clad in fursuit to represent its anthropomorphic animal characters, made by furries, for furries.

Before Bitter Lake, I'd never considered this method to realize a furry movie, and after Bitter Lake, well, I still haven't. Noble experiment, sure. Quality movie? Well, we're not reviewing Bitter Lake now, so let's just move along…

Hundreds of Beavers is a sort of outside the fandom take on the "fursuit movie" that, after playing film festivals last year, had a very short theatrical release this year before launching on various streaming services. It is a black-and-white, mostly dialogue-free slapstick comedy featuring newbie fur trapper Jean Kayak (co-writer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) as he struggles to survive in the wilderness around the Great Lakes region of pre-United States America. Fellow co-writer Mike Cheslik directs. The movie features beavers, raccoons, rabbits, dogs, skunks and wolves, all played by actors in mascot costumes.

Let's review some computer-animated films! Here are trailers for:

Short version: The Tiger's Apprentice, action, one character has a tiger form, lots of Chinese culture, story is nothing great. Heroes of the Golden Mask, terrible. Rumble, wrestling-sponsored sports comedy, very formula loser-wins story, maybe of interest to furry macro fans.

The Animal Kingdom (trailer) is a 128-minute live-action French film released in 2023 (Le règne animal). It's the second movie directed by Thomas Cailley, and co-written with Pauline Munier.

Set in modern-day France, there's been a worrying development: some people are slowly mutating into animals, and society has not been adjusting well. The story follows a small family, Émile (Paul Kircher), a disaffected and conflicted teenager, and his father François (Romain Duris), who move to the south-west of France to be near the family's mother, Lana, who's been in government care ever since she began to change. A road accident makes her fate unclear, adding stress to an already stressful situation. With many people heavily biased against the mutations, Émile finds himself starting to change too.

Despite the fantastical premise, it's primarily a drama about the relationship between Émile and his father. I'd hesitate to call it a coming-of-age film, because Émile isn't going to become an adult - at least, not a human one.

LAPIN (available on Steam) is a 2D precision platformer from South Korean Studio Doodal released in the second half of 2023. In it, you play as the abandoned pet rabbit Liebe who, accompanied by four rabbits who took her in, must go on a journey to find a new home.

Plot

The basic plot: forced to leave your home in the local park due to construction work, you must journey to find a new home, following a legendary rabbit explorer's map. This immediately echoes those childhood staples The Animals of Farthing Wood (reviewed here) and Watership Down; both have bands of animals – also rabbits in the latter case – forced to leave their home and journey to find a new one. Given that the rabbits are constantly searching for "Paradise", there may also be some influence from Wolf's Rain.

I remember when I first saw the animation of a rat vagabond flipping out the blade of a Swiss army knife, standing before a large orange cat on a kitchen floor. And ever since that day, I looked forward to playing this game. Of course, this came out in a time when ideas and funding campaigns were plenty, and many ideas never made it past that point. So let’s just say, I lacked faith that I’d ever see more than the wonderfully stylized and animated videos.

I’ve never been more happy to be wrong. The team behind this game persevered and gave me a pleasant surprise when the game was finally announced to be released in late 2023. But now that it is out, was the game worth all the hype?

In short, if you like your RPGs with challenging combat, then you may find this one too easy. However, if you play these games for the story, characters, setting, and intrigue, then this one is one that any furry would be loath to miss. In fact, if you’re a regular to this site you probably played it already.

I've already seen this movie twice, paying full price both times. Kung Fu Panda 4 is the first movie I've watched multiple times in theaters since Zootopia. I liked it, is what I'm saying. It is part of the Kung Fu Panda series of movies, which would be important to furry movie fans even if they weren't very good. No other fully-anthropomorphic-animal-populated movie franchise out there has gotten to four movies. Fortunately, the series has consistently been one of the better animated franchises, furry or not.

In this fourth instalment, directed by Oklahoma's own Mike Mitchell (with co-director Stephanie Ma Stine), the titular Kung Fu Panda, Po (voiced by Jack Black), first Dragon Warrior of the Valley of Peace, is tasked with finding his replacement by Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffmann) – explicitly identified as a red panda for the first time in the series. Unwilling to accept giving up his role as protector of the Valley, he instead joins sneaky fox thief Zhen (voiced by Awkwafina, Zhen is not one of the "big three" fox species of red, Arctic and fennec, but a rarely-seen Corsac fox) on a quest to defeat the Chameleon (Viola Davis; no bonus points for guessing her species), an evil sorceress with the ability to shapeshift and steal kung fu powers, like a PG funny animal version of Mortal Kombat's Shang Tsung.

This year’s list contains movies directed by Wes Anderson, Greta Gerwig, Hayao Miyazaki, Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese.

It also contains two adaptations of toy properties and two Marvel movies! Got to let people know it’s still me.

When writing this article for 2022's works, my thought was to help present short furry animations in a way that’d promote organic discussion. I enjoyed doing it, so will try to make it an annual tradition. As I was going through the Ursa Major recommended list, I found these entries had become a bit longer than last year; there were also more of them, so they took more time to review, but for most it was well worth the time.

These are the eleven I felt were most worth a view, plus a bonus, lightly-viewed short not on the Recommended list that I felt worth talking about.

Three foreign animated film reviews! Behold the trailers for:

All of these films successfully blend 3D and 2D animation in their own different styles.

White Fang is the most 3D, applying a brush-like texture to characters to create a 2D, painted look. Angel's main characters are 2D, with 3D designs used for the settings. Bears uses 3D for almost everything, then alters its visuals to look as 2D as possible.

How do you review a movie?

Let’s take, as an example, the movie Migration. The purpose of a review is to give the reader an idea of what the movie is like, and whether or not they might want to spend the time and money to watch it. The basic facts of the movie should be listed; so, in this example, Migration is a computer animated movie from Illumination (The Secret Life of Pets, Sing), directed by Benjamin Renner (Ernest & Celestine, The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales). I included examples of the creator's previous work that might give my audience some idea of what to expect. However, this can easily be found on free sources like IMDB or Wikipedia, and a review is not just a recitation of facts.

A brief plot synopsis is usually a good idea. In Migration’s case, the story is about a family of ducks (Kumail Nanjiani as father Mack, Elizabeth Banks as mother Pam, Caspar Jennings as son Dax, Tresi Gazal as daughter Gwen and Danny Devito as uncle Dan) who decide to migrate from their tiny pond to Jamaica. It plays like a road trip comedy, but with ducks. Along the way, they have adventures with a decrepit heron (voiced by Carol Kane) and her mute husband, a one-legged pigeon (voiced by Awkwafina), a caged parrot (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) and a cult-like group of farm ducks, while being chased by a chef who specializes in duck à l'orange.

Once we have details of what Migration the movie is, we can move on to the reviewer's opinion.