Yay! Time for another episode of digging up positivity! April sure has been a big month for the furry fandom, and we have some lovely animation news as well. Plus an interview with a really awesome furry from Wales, who often does amazing things for not just the local community but for charity as well! But first, the charities!

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is Illumination's latest release from their vast catalog of animated filmography. The film is the inevitable sequel to The Super Mario Bros. Movie from 2023, which was one of the most successful films of that year. While there are improvements from that original film, the film still does possess major flaws that the original has that are made even more apparent in this sequel.
 
While the animation quality is not a huge step up from the first film, the dynamic camera work is very exciting and made action scenes a lot more engaging than in the first film. In regard to character design, the characters transitioned from their video game iterations to cinema very well.
 
One of the major criticisms that the first film received was the lack of original compositions in the soundtrack in favor of licensed music. This film contains a lot more compositions from the Super Mario franchise in its soundtrack that helps elevate this film above the standard Illumination film.
 

Yay! Time for another episode of digging up positivity! The first quarter of this year is almost over, and furries around the world are supporting charities to make this world a little bit better. Besides that, we have furries in Spain Got Talent, some animation news, but first— the charities!

This is an incomplete list of titles that will be removed from Netflix during March 2026 (with a handful in early April), mostly in Canada and/or in the United States. Unless otherwise noted, end dates are based on the Netflix Canada service.

(Started putting this list together around March 12, so it mostly skips any content that was removed before that day. It was slow work; some USA exit dates are elusive to verify. My writing was hampered by a respiratory infection. I'm now non-infectious, but am still healing).

The most notable losses (in my opinion) are Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) and African Folktales Reimagined; details below. Also, I want to mention two things being removed after March:

April 5:

• Sirius the Jaeger (12 episodes; anime): vampire hunters including a "werewolf". NOT a traditional werewolf; small amount of body transformation plus glowing eyes.

June 25:

• Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts (seasons 1-3): with varies species of interest to furries. (Included this ahead of time, to increase the chances that before June, Flayrah readers have time to watch all 30 episodes.)

Because She-Ra and the Princesses of Power series (AWESOME show) was removed from Netflix, I was concerned that The Dragon Prince series would also be removed. I've now watched the entire series and recommend it. A sequel series, The Dragon King, has been funded by a Kickstarter that was "fully funded in under 5 hours" (source: Kickstarter), and raised more than a MILLION dollars ($1,098,489) from fans in 29 days. Because the sequel was not funded by Netflix, it seems unclear where it become available.

Pixar's track record with animated anthropomorphic animals is kind of odd. Early on, it seemed to avoid the concept, or almost consciously steer towards animal characters not normally featured in animated movies. Its first two movies to fully feature animal characters were the insect-featuring A Bug's Life and the fish-focused Finding Nemo, the two types of animals the recent fully furry world sequel Zootopia 2 went out of its way to show were "okay to eat". The only other animal stars from the first decade of the twenty-first century from Pixar were the rats from Ratatouille, also an odd choice for an animal star. The goal seemed to be, if they were going to do something as "conventional" as a talking animal picture, they'd at least go for an "un-conventional" animal to do the talking.

More recently, however, Pixar has seemingly preferred variations on human-to-animal transformation. Brave, with magical human to bear transformations, was an early example, though the trend didn't really start until this decade, with Soul featuring a man stuck in a cat's body for most of the back half of the movie, Turning Red basically a straightforward furry transformation fantasy, and now Hoppers, which takes a more "science fiction" approach to the human intelligence in an animal's body. Directed by Daniel Chong, it tells the story of nature-lover Mabel (voiced by Piper Curda), who hijacks a local university's science project involving transferring human minds into animal robots in order to stop a highway project, becoming a beaver in disguise. I'm not entirely sure why Pixar has suddenly gotten really into "tf me into a ..." type stories, but it is a trend I've noticed.

(I also don't get how trendy beavers have gotten all the sudden. Is it dirty, or what?)

Dog Man (trailer) is an 89-minute 3D action-comedy animated film released by DreamWorks in 2025. It was written and directed by Peter Hastings, based on the Dog Man series of children's graphic novels by Dav Pilkey, which are a spin-off from his Captain Underpants books. And because this film is up for a 2025 Ursa Major Award, this seemed like a good opportunity to watch and review it, while the voting period is still open!

Dog Man is an anthro-dog cop, created in a hospital emergency room after an accident critically injures a human cop and his pet dog, saving their lives by fusing them together. Don't think about it too much. He has no tail and communicates entirely by canine sounds. His arch-enemy is an anthro-cat criminal named Petey, who's very fond of creating diabolical machines. The whole thing is happily silly, and remarkably, the trailer doesn't spoil anything!

(Though it does lie. Dog Man can, in fact, play the piano quite well.)

The fate of Warner Bros. seems to be up in the air, as the company burns billions of dollars each year, proceeding with major staff layoffs and cancelled projects. In the past few years, Warner Bros. removed most of their animated content from HBO Max and were about to shelve their upcoming Looney Tunes film Coyote vs. Acme until Ketchup Entertainment acquired distribution rights.

On February 13, 2026, streaming service Tubi announced they will add many classic Warner Bros.-owned cartoons to their platform this March. The selection of cartoons range from the 1960s to the 2010s, so there's a lot of variety.

Amid Amidi reports on his Cartoon Brew website about Disney’s plans to produce a 2016 animated feature about a fox and rabbit “odd couple” in a world of talking animals. Let’s hope this gets farther than Silly Hillbillies on Mars. (Hey, Disney, whatever happened to that?)
Fred Patten, Disney promises "odd couple" furry flick 'Zootopia' in 2016

Not all furry movies can be Zootopia, with its combination of critical acclaim, box office success and industry awards. However, not all furry movies can be, period. Sometimes, a movie gets announced, and then never actually makes it to theaters (or even home video or streaming services).

Flayrah has covered quite a few movie announcements, some quite early in development, and while sometimes an early article on "Zootopia (working title)" or Master P: Kung-Fu Panda leads to furry greatness, sometimes it leads nowhere. The following is a list of such movies covered by Flayrah at least up until 2020. And who knows, maybe some of them will slip out of development hell and finally become real movies!

Note: Expect a lot of dead links in the older archived articles listed below.

GOAT (trailer) is a computer-animated sports-comedy film from Sony Pictures Animation, released in February 2026. Directed by Tyree Dillihay and Adam Rosette, it's 100 minutes long. I don't even like sports, and I really enjoyed it! Rotten Tomatoes currently rates it 83% / 93%. I'd definitely recommend going to see it before Disney's Hoppers steals the limelight.

Taking place in a world of anthro animals (yay!), the manager of the struggling Vineland Thorns basketball roarball team recruits a new player named Will, a goat played by Caleb McLaughlin. Will has dreamed his whole life of becoming a pro, and is up against a ton of discrimination for being physically small on the court. But mostly it's the other members of the team who are their own worst enemies - and Will's arrival is the catalyst that starts turning things around.

This is an incomplete list of titles that will be removed from Netflix during February 2026, mostly in Canada and/or in the United States. Unless otherwise noted, end dates are based on the Netflix Canada service.

(Started putting this list together around Feb. 7, so it mostly skips any content that was removed during the first week of the month. It was slow work; some USA exit dates are elusive to verify.)

The most discouraging losses (in my opinion) are Sing and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power; details below.

I am crossie, and I bid you welcome, dear reader, to my top ten movies of 2025 list! Enter freely, go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring in the comment section, here or at my Letterboxd account!

This year, I have chosen as my Best Furry movie of the year Zootopia 2. Please do not be too surprised by this. I pick a furry movie each year as the list is not meant to be primarily furry, despite Flayrah being a furry site. In addition, I sometimes pick a movie that I saw too late to include on last year's list, but would have made a good choice; this year that movie is The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, and only then because it had a small awards qualifying run in 2024.

With those preliminaries out of the way, read on for the actual list. (Note that each movie title as well as movie poster has a link to either a Flayrah review, when available, or barring that, an IMDB page.)

Hello everybody and welcome to the first episode in 2026 of Digging Up Positivity!

In this episode we have quite some animation news, an interview of the man behind The Friendliest Skunk, a really awesome video game, and of course a ton of charities by our wonderfully weird fandom!

We are now in the fourth year of reviewing the dramatic shorts category based on the recommendations submitted to the Ursa Majors along with random ones I may have seen during the year, or items that maybe the algorithms caught that only get recommended at this time of year for some reason. The choices here are, once again, polished and only one or two in the whole list had missing elements. Without you all curating your choices these lists would not happen so thank you for your efforts this year.

New to the format this year is that I’ll lean toward sectionalizing so that the text before the video doesn’t go too much into spoiler territory and any text afterwards will go more into elements I liked that address the content itself as to not spoil any desire to view without being painted by those thoughts.

(Prior Years: 2024, 2023, 2022)

The Monkey King (trailer) is a 96-minute 3D animated film produced by Netflix along with several studios in East Asia. It was directed by Anthony Stacchi and written by Steve Bencich, Ron J. Friedman, and Rita Hsiao.

When the film came out in August 2023, supposedly it was the most streamed film on Netflix that month; but IMDB rates it a 5.8 out of 10, and Rotten Tomatoes gives it 56% / 63%. For animation and visuals I think it should score slightly higher; story-wise I think that's a good assessment.

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.