Many furries had left the platform formerly known as Twitter, and I myself had moved onto bluer skies. While not as active as I once was, I have hung around to keep an eye on things. Streamers typically use it as a simple content regurgitator, but it’s mostly very simple content. It’s rare that any content stirs conversation these days, probably bebcause the bot army with the blue checkmarks will come around and "um, actually" followed by a talking point for the site's owner. But sometimes the steamer stars align to create an unintentional talking point.

One day apart the stream recap clips of Gebbous and Wolfffff posted content when they were discussing with chat their expectations for decorum, which ended up in such a way on my timeline where these two people were almost having a debate they didn’t even know they were involved in. However, in the more active internet where fans engage with the creators in real time it shows how diverse the expectations are even within the furry fandom when it comes from the behaviors of those beyond the fourth wall.

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.)

It is now March of 2026, and a story over two decades old has now been given new life and a new perspective when it comes to the behavior of media organizations in the early 2000s. At this time furries faced a hostile media landscape which included many infamous titles, such as “that one episode of CSI” by the name of Fur and Loathing.

This story is in regards to another of these publications, which was an article published by Vanity Fair by the name of “Pleasures of the Fur” this article went into very adult aspects of the fandom in a particularly sensationalist way that many furries of the time felt was inappropriate. The article was released in March of 2001 by George Gurley. It is a very raw, gonzo style piece that talks with furries and locals around Midwest Furfest in the year 2000, back when as the article mentioned, only 400 were in attendance.

Two years following this article, another piece would be released by Vanity Fair that was far more reserved in its approach. In fact the article didn't make the cover unlike our own. This hushed article of praise would end up changing the trajectory of an entire country toward one of its darkest chapters. This article covered the billionaire by the name of Jeffery Epstein. Recently it has come to light that the original author for that piece had their story reshaped and partially redacted when she found a thread of abuse perpetrated by the billionaire. Now in 2026, these are allegations that we are all too familiar with in the modern day after Jeffery’s conviction and death in prison.

Like other things around this story, reader discretion is advised as this covers topics such as abuse.

Time estimate: 28 - 34 hours (Thomas [Fox] Playthough)
Available: XBox,Steam
Game Type: Narrative based Slice of Life RPG with resource management elements
Elements of Game not Reviewed: Bob [Panther] Playthrough, combat elements

Back to the Dawn is a computer game where your character Thomas, a fox journalist, ends up in prison by a corrupt mayor looking to quash a story about a facility plant polluting a nearby community that the politician’s relatives “allegedly” have some stake in. Your imprisonment comes 21 days before the re-election campaign that will ensure his corruption will remain for many years to come. In this game and story you will need to lead Thomas on his mission to prove his innocence, or perhaps find a way to flee the prison and corrupt metropolis that has put a target on his back.

This is a life simulator RPG mixed with time and resource management. You’ll need to play to your strengths to acquire items and information that can help you on your journey to freedom, all while the system wants to break your mind and body so that you give up or give in.

You can also play as another character who acts as an NPC in Thomas’s quest. Bob the black panther is an undercover officer who is assigned to the prison and has an entire quest unique to him. I did not play that to review however.

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.

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.)

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.

When I used to live in Wichita, Kansas, I loved watching movies at the Warren Theatre West, and I have a specific memory of one movie I saw there, less because of movie itself, but because of an interaction with the ticket seller.

The movie was Wes Craven's My Soul to Take, and she helpfully informed me that if I walked out in the first thirty minutes, I would be refunded. Not exactly reassuring me about my ticket choice that evening, but I had to wonder what people, exactly, were expecting from a "Dead Teenager Movie" from Wes "Nightmare on Elm Street" Craven.

I did not refund my ticket, and though I can't actually recall much from the movie (other than a bizarre scene involving a pooping papier mache condor), I still remember it fondly. It was fun, but what else did I expect from a Wes "Scream" Craven slasher picture?

Anyway, he's dead now.

But we're not here to review Wes "Music of the Heart" Craven's My Soul to Take, but instead director Emma Tammi's Five Nights at Freddy's 2, which currently has a paltry 16% "Rotten" rating on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, which is somehow almost, but not quite, half the score of the first Five Night's at Freddy's, despite being a marked improvement. In fact, I rather enjoyed it.

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.

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.

"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...