If there's one furry series I should be completely behind, but have always been a bit down on, it's Illumination's Sing franchise. The series is set in a completely furry world, with a complete lack of humans – something I can always get behind. And yet, I can't ever quite get behind them.

I think if I had to put my finger on what's wrong, it's that the Sing movies feel like the Illumination version of Oscar bait, being behind the scenes musicals that ostensibly celebrate the performing arts, something Academy Awards voters should, in theory, love; and yet, they can't even get the easy lay up of Best Original Song, which is straightforwardly embarrassing for movies called, well, Sing. It's not that they're failed Oscar Bait, it's that they're not going for Best Picture, or even Best Animated Feature, but simply seem to be aiming to be nominated in that category. They're not aiming for the top, and they're still missing!

Or maybe I'm just being too hard on them, and displacing my own Oscar obsessions on this otherwise innocuous series of jukebox musicals with no higher goal than to be entertaining bits of fluff. The newest entry in the franchise, if it can be called that, is just that. Sing: Thriller is a short available on Netflix, and it features a simple take on a nightmare zombie apocalypse, but furry and kid-friendly; an obvious homage to Michael Jackson's Thriller. It's definitely for kids, with a rating of TV-Y, for "fear", which I think would only apply to the absolute youngest viewers.

In this episode!

• This episode can hold so much charities!Breaking last years record! But by how much?
• Animations from around the web
• An interview with Labb Rat, known for her commentary videos, about the importance of caring about mental health and escaping toxic environments.

But first, the latest charity news from the fandom in this October edition of Digging Up Positivity and boy are here a lot of them! Do keep in mind, all amounts are converted to US dollars.

Chris Sanders has only directed four animated features (plus a live action adaptation Call of the Wild), and the previous three (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train your Dragon and The Croods put him in four way tie for most nominations without a win in the Best Animated Feature category at the Oscars. It feels pretty certain that The Wild Robot will be the movie that finally wins him that Oscar, but we'll keep such speculation to a minimum.

Sanders's first feature, Lilo & Stitch, is probably the only truly great movie to come out of Walt Disney Animation Studios in the first decade of this century. (To be clear, you're allowed to like other movies from that decade, but most were flawed.) Anyway, the upshot of Lilo & Stitch becoming a beloved classic is that its directors, Sanders and his writing and directing partner, Dean Deblois, were driven out of Disney by John Lasseter a few years later (I don't like that guy).

Sanders and Deblois took their talents to DreamWorks Animation, where they delivered How to Train Your Dragon to the studio, often seen as one of the highlights of its output.

I've often seen Sanders cast as the "idea guy" in the Sanders/Deblois partnership, as well as being the guy who brings a lot of unique visual aspects to his projects, while Deblois is the more story-driven member of the partnership, bringing in the emotional aspects. I'm not so sure about that, especially after this movie, which features an emotional story just as potent as Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, sans Deblois. The Wild Robot also features a visual design that echoes the original illustrations of the book it's based on, by Peter Brown, showing Sanders is more than just a recognizable art style.

In this episode!

• It’s high season for conventions, and it shows in the amount raised for charity world wide!
• Learning about neurodiversity through cute animations
• A wonderful interview how the fandom changed an aspiring cartoonist

But first, the latest charity news from the fandom in this September edition of Digging Up Positivity!

When discussing modern adaptations of classical Greek myths, you can frequently see people complain about the changes the authors made: "That's not authentic, not traditional; that's not what really happened in the original." In fact, reinterpreting old stories, giving them a new, contemporary meaning, weaving several different tales into one - is the truest, most authentic Ancient Greek tradition. That's what Greek (and, later, Roman) writers always did.

Of course, some older texts - Homer, in the first place - were regarded higher than others, but there was no 'canon', no Old Testament; no single authority on what 'really happened'. In one of Euripides' tragedies, Helen of Troy is a callous, cynical adulteress; in another by the same poet, she's a woman of the highest moral qualities who's never even been to Troy. That's because, when writing these two plays, Euripides set very different tasks before himself.

'Icare' (2022) is a French-language feature film mixing 2D and 3D animation. It was made by Luxembourg studio The Iris Group, directed and co-written by former Pixar employee Carlo Vogele. The movie was the Luxembourg's "Best Foreign Film" submission for the 2023 Oscars. It tells the story of Icarus, son of the illustrious artist and inventor Daedalus, entwining it with another famous Cretan myth - that of Asterion ("stellar", "star-like"), more commonly known as the Minotaur.

It's a flood of reviews! Today's trailers are for:

Those are in increasing order of recommendation. The first three are for kids, the fourth is anime, and the last one isn't furry but is worth mentioning!

In this episode!

• An exclusive interview with the force behind Brok the investigator
• Last month's furry charities
• What makes a fursuit really stands out!
• The results of the Pride Shirt give-away and how to get one yourself

But first, the latest charity news from the fandom in this July edition of Digging Up Positivity!

In this episode!

• Cool animation news!
• How an actual photographer won in an generative AI contest
• A furry Halloween in Rotterdam!
• The worlds first furry opera!
• How to win this amazing Pride shirt, so fresh, mine is still in the mail.

But first, the latest charity news from the fandom in the June edition of Digging Up Positivity!

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.

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.

Welcome to the April episode of Digging Up Positivity! Spring is in the air and summer is just around the corner.

In this episode:

• The April charities from the fandom
• Even crocodiles need to go to the dentist
• Animation news
• A wonderful interview with one of the main forces behind AnthroIrish!

And much more.

Oh hey! Also, I am happy to say we are giving out item from my PAWS collection from my ArtworkTee store, more details at the end of this video.

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.

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.

"Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?"
"Can you?"
-The one good part of I, Robot

Bogged down in all the recent controversy about "generative AI" is that one of the reasons the research began was, in creating a program that can "create" a painting, we are theoretically trying to answer the evergreen science fiction question of whether a machine can become, well, perhaps not "human". Maybe a better word would be "anthropomorphic".

DreamWorks Animation's The Wild Robot will be coming to theaters September 20 of this year. Pretentious preambles aside, this movie is not just of furry interest because it has a robot that can be described as anthropomorphic; the trailer reveals plenty of animal characters who can also be described as anthropomorphic.

Thanks to Cartoon Brew, we found out about several interesting new animated films coming soon to Netflix. Among them is Thelma the Unicorn. “Thelma is a small-time pony who dreams of becoming a glamorous music star. In a pink and glitter-filled moment of fate, Thelma is transformed into a unicorn and instantly rises to global stardom. But this new life of fame comes at a cost.” Don’t know much about this one otherwise, but it’s directed by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre) and Lynn Wang (Unikitty!), and it’s due on May 17th.

image c. 2024 Netflix