Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.
Ribbit, directed by Chuck Powers. 88 minutes. September 4, 2014.
This CGI animated feature was released theatrically in Malaysia, in Malay, on September 4, 2014. But I saw it at my sister’s on On Demand TV in English on January 16, 2015.
It is not the worst movie that I have ever seen, but it comes close.
Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.
Ooops! Noah is Gone…, directed by Toby Genkel and Sean McCormack. For Summer 2015.
The number of theatrical animated features coming in 2015 keeps getting larger.
There have been uncountable magazine cartoon variations of a pair of unicorns standing on a rainswept mountaintop, watching Noah’s Ark sailing off into the distance. But up to now, no animated feature has concentrated upon the animals that didn’t get onto the Ark.
Well, mainly just a couple of the animals; the nestrians and the grymps. No, I haven’t heard of them before, either. The German film sales company Global Screen has announced that Ulysses Filmproduktion in Hamburg is just finishing production of Ooops! Noah is Gone… (Ooops! Die Arche ist Weg …), a CGI “end of the world comedy” for families/children about the “untold story of the animals that didn’t get on the ark”.
Fanfiction: Transformative Works from Shakespeare to Sherlock assigns homework to read a story replacing characters with animals. (See March 4 in the link.) I emailed the professor for comment to furries. She has an interesting background and is author of “Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World”. (Her previous course focused on Twilight – the movie just came out, so I’m guessing that’s why she had many journalist encounters.)
Professor Anne Jamison writes:
Yay! Two things promoted here are on the short list of Ursa Major nominees.
Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer:
Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.
Furtual Horizons; A Rainfurrest Anthology, edited by Ryan “Sterling” Hickey. Illustrated.
Dallas, TX, FurPlanet Productions, September 2014, trade paperback $10.00 (269 pages).
Furtual Horizons is the fourth annual RainFurrest charity fiction anthology, following 2011’s Stories of Camp Rainfurrest, 2012’s Tails of a Clockwork World, and 2013’s Dancing in the Moonlight. “The RainFurrest Annual Charity Anthology was created to celebrate and showcase the literary aspect of the anthropomorphics fandom as well as to raise funds for charity. The charity for RainFurrest 2014 is Cougar Mountain Zoo (http://www.cougarmountainzoo.org/).” All stories are donated to RainFurrest by mid-June, and the anthology is published by FurPlanet Productions in Dallas to be sold at the convention in September, and subsequently at future RainFurrests and through the FurPlanet catalogue. RainFurrest 2014 raised $6,500 for Cougar Mountain Zoological Park in Seattle’s suburb of Issaquah.
RainFurrest 2014’s and its anthology’s theme was “Cyberpunk”. Furtual Horizons contains eleven stories, six of which are illustrated with full-page frontispieces.
Frankly, this 2014 anthology is the first that has looked like a real book rather than a thin booklet of barely over 100 pages. At eleven stories and 269 pages, the reader gets his/her full money’s worth. Also, personally, I am getting increasingly annoyed by the convention’s inability to settle on its spelling of RainFurrest or Rainfurrest after eight years.
“Artificial Evolution” by Shelled Spirit Bear (illustrated by Slavestate Comic) is set in the year 2460. It features Rachel, a robot; Alan, an anthro red fox; Shun, a female large 7’ gray shark in a black bikini; and later a Red Mechanoid. On the first page Rachel, the narrator, is badly damaged in an accident. It turns out that “she” is in an old-fashioned mechanical body: Read the rest of this entry »
Just published in the media: SF IS A HOTBED OF ONE KINKY-CREEPY-CUTE SUBCULTURE. And: SAN FRANCISCO – A FURRY FETISH EPICENTER. More on that shortly. (I apologize if this post is jumbled to read all at once- a lot of related topics just happened.)
1) Researcher Debra Soh recently wrote about Furries in Harper’s Magazine. I invited her to submit a piece here. She sent:
Headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag. Tips are always welcome.
The Tufts Daily goes to a furry convention.
Anthro New England gets a good college news piece. My Newsdump gathers links as news happens, but it’s interesting there’s no other media articles this time!
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I hope you like remakes, because it seems there’s no stopping the onslaught…
New images for Disney’s Zootopia.
i09 shares an update from what may be the new furriest movie ever, scheduled for 2016. “Taken from the Disney Facebook page, these new Zootopia images reveal these animals have designed their buildings and bridges look like their own furry appendages.”
Hulu’s docuseries “Behind the Mask” stars pro mascots.
Unmask new characters. S2 of the #hulu original docuseries "Behind the Mask” is now streaming: http://t.co/cFswK5ht2x pic.twitter.com/tO1ojHGfSj
— hulu (@hulu) February 26, 2015
Do those titles perk your ears up? They had major impact on cult movies from the 1990’s to now. The Crow won a new level of respect for comic-based movies, which had never been so dark before. (The soundtrack alone was a gateway for countless black-clad kids.) Then, Dark City created a visionary sci-fi dystopia world with only a handful to compare: like Brazil, The City of Lost Children, or Blade Runner. It was stellar work from director Alex Proyas. 1994-1998 may have been his peak (so far.)
There was supposed to be a movie in between: an adaptation of Freak’s Amour, an obscure but highly praised cult novel by Tom De Haven. It was optioned and scripted for Proyas. The project fell by the wayside for two sad reasons. One was aftershocks from the tragic death of Brandon Lee on set of The Crow. The other was critical success but financial failure for Dark City. Even though it’s called the best movie by Proyas, it hurt his career. It was triumph and tragedy. A year later, The Matrix came along (sharing studio and style) and won all the attention. Dark City has continued to influence movies like Inception.
Proyas followed up with 3 features that got mixed reviews. There’s mentions of a number of projects in development. The next one for sure is Gods of Egypt in 2016. (Hey furries, I wonder if there will be characters like Anubis?)
As far as I can tell, almost nobody in the fan world has talked about this lost movie project. (As a fan of the novel, I’d never known about it until now!) Stories like this are why I blog.
It’s an indirect topic for a Furry blog. The anthropomorphism is Monster Movie style – not funny animals. This is for sci-fi fans in general, especially ones for the niche called Body Horror. But it’s inspired by comics, and it’s relevant.
“…The story of Freak’s Amour is, in it’s own way, a story of body dysphoria.” – Dana Marie Andra, artist for the comic.
Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.
Previously: French Anthropomorphic Animal Animated Features, Part 1. There will be four parts.
Continuing from where we left off …
Le Château des Singes (The Castle of Monkeys), directed by Jean-François Laguionie. 76 minutes. June 2, 1999.
Kom, a brash young monkey, is a member of the Woonko tribe which lives in the treetops, believing that the earth below them is inhabited by demons. Kom scoffs at this, and generally makes himself unpopular. One day he accidentally falls to the ground, where he meets the Lankoo tribe; monkeys like himself. He falls in love with Gina and is adopted into the Lankoos, although Gina is repelled by his boastfulness. But Kom and Gina become enmeshed in Lankoo politics when they discover that Sebastian the Chancellor is plotting to kill the king, poison Princess Ida, and rule with Ida’s evil governess. They are too late to save the king, but they expose the plotters and save Ida, who becomes the new queen. Kom brings Gina back to the Woonkos, where they will work to unify the two monkey tribes
Laguionie is an international award-winning animation director whose previous shorts and feature did not include any anthro animals. His second feature (international title: A Monkey’s Tale) won the Best Animated Feature Film award at the 5th Kecskemét (Hungary) Animation Film Festival, and was the first to bring him international attention.
A Monkey’s Tale website – Full movie:
When pop culture notices furry fans, it loves leaping to conclusions. The internet has porn, and the weird furry stuff can make people’s eyes bug out and stick in their minds. So is that what being a furry is about? Some people have a kink for that – is it fair to stick all furry fans in that category?
The assumed link of furries and sex is often made thoughtlessly by outsiders. It’s the topic furries love to hate. But despite the attention, I’m told that no serious research has been done on this. Sure, there have been surveys that ask blanket questions about sex orientation, or a selection of certain kinks. But there isn’t enough broad knowledge for anybody to be fully informed. That’s bad for two reasons.
First, common beliefs can’t be challenged or disproved without data. Second, if data does support some of these beliefs, then the topic deserves better understanding. Objective answers reduce assumptions. It can replace fear and rumor with real information. Informed people make a more tolerant society. There are more gay people in this subculture than general society – the reason isn’t clear, but their socializing has gained more tolerance with understanding. Other questioned activities may be reconciled too.
Researchers from Northwestern University in Illinois are spreading a survey about these sensitive and murky topics. They intend to research relations between furry fan sexuality, and their identities and personalities. Their survey is on lesser studied aspects of this.
Disclaimer: to avoid making bias, I can’t guess or tell specific aims behind their work. Building studies and their methodology is out of my area, anyways. All I can do is pick apart interpretation of statistics afterwards. I did spend time talking with the researchers and emphasizing respect. I told them to hold their cards and not tell me what the survey is testing, to prevent bias in sharing. That leaves it up to you to choose how to respond.
