dronon's stories

Voting opens for the 2020 Ursa Major Awards
Mon 1 Mar 2021 - 13:55

The Ursa Major Awards logo. The 2020 Ursa Major Awards vote is ready to go! Send them your e-mail address, and you can vote for any of the nominations in 14 categories. (Last year's "Dramatic Series or Short Work" has been split into two separate categories.) Voting closes on Wednesday, March 31.

Please re-post this announcement if you're on an active furry message forum or social media site!

This year's nominees are... [Update (2 May): the winners have been announced!]

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Movie review: 'Mosley' (2019)
Thu 25 Feb 2021 - 09:31

The movie poster for Mosley. The tag line reads 'Stand upright'.Mosley (trailer) is a 2019 computer-animated children's film that showed up on furry fandom's radar about six years ago as Beast of Burden. Written and directed by American animator Kirby Atkins, it was a labor of love that had been in various stages of development for over 15 years. The movie was finally brought to life thanks to a collaboration between animation studios in New Zealand and China. I enjoyed it!

The story takes place in an alternative, pre-industrialized Earth, that includes "thoriphants", an intelligent, quadrupedal, elephant-like species forced into servitude by mankind to do labor like horses and donkeys. Fully sentient and able to talk, Mosley, along with his pregnant mate Bera and his young son Rue, are the property of a disgruntled farmer. When Rue discovers a cave with drawings of bipedal, anthropomorphic thoriphants, Mosley must confront the possibility that the legendary tales of the "Uprights" might be true. Soon he'll be on a quest to find out.

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Movie review: 'Dragon Rider' (2020)
Sat 20 Feb 2021 - 10:29

Dragon Rider (trailer) is a 2020 computer-animated children's film, a German production (Drachenreiter) whose UK English dub was recently released online. Adapted from a best-selling children's book by Cornelia Funke, it's the story of a young dragon in the modern-day world, searching for a refuge where dragons can stay safe from mankind. Short version: You can skip this one.

The film was directed by Tomer Eshed (Flamingo Pride) who doesn't seem to have worked on anything this big before. The production company, Constantin Film, appears to have outsourced the animation to several studios, so it's not clear if there was a unified vision. The screenplay was adapted by... John R. Smith? Who, according to IMDB and its scoring system, is the genius behind Gnomeo & Juliet (5.9 out of 10), Sherlock Gnomes (5.2), and The Queen's Corgi (4.8).

Given that The Queen's Corgi is also the rare recipient of a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it's a bit of a red flag. Dragon Rider's IMDB score currently sits at 5.5.

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Winners of the 2019 Ursa Major Awards!
Sat 23 May 2020 - 20:20

Ursa Majors Awards.jpgThe Ursa Majors have announced their winners for 2019, celebrating excellence in the furry arts! Due to Covid-19, there was no formal ceremony at a furry convention this year; instead the results were announced on May 23, 2020 in a YouTube video.

Determined by popular vote, two categories were excluded this year due to not getting enough nominations (Fursuits and Non-Fiction).

The winners and runners-up are...

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Movie review: 'Animal Crackers' (2017)
Fri 10 Apr 2020 - 23:46

Animal Crackers (trailer) is a 94-minute computer-animated children's movie. The brainchild of Scott Sava, it caught the early attention of furry fandom at least as far back as 2015. Concept animation showed a guy haphazardly munching on animal-shaped cookies that turned him into the animals. As time went on, Sava brought in financial backers, a co-director (Tony Bancroft, who'd worked on several Disney movies), and a co-writer (Dean Lorey). The finished product premiered at the Annecy Film Festival in 2017... and then vanished.

It turns out that Sava had made the mistake of not securing a distributor ahead of time. With very little bargaining power, it eventually got shown in China in 2018, and some other countries in 2019.

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Movie review: 'Underdog' (2018)
Thu 23 Jan 2020 - 19:22

Underdog (언더독, trailer) is a South Korean animated film from 2018, written and directed by Oh Sung-yoon at Odoltogi Studio, and co-directed by Lee Chun-baek who previously directed Leafie, A Hen into the Wild.

The main character is Moongchi, a dog who loves and trusts his owners, so he's understandably confused when he's deliberately left behind in the woods. Luckily he soon meets a group of other abandoned dogs who take him in, surviving in an empty slum on the edge of the nearby town.

While his fellow strays beg and scrounge to survive, Moongchi is still figuring things out. Wandering up the mountain into the forest, he meets a small group of wild dogs and wants to impress one of them, a female named Bami. Trouble is brewing for both groups, and soon they must unite and find a new place to live.

Winners of the 2019 Best Anthropomorphic Artwork Awards
Sat 18 Jan 2020 - 15:05

Commission for SammyTheTanuki, by Ira-ArnThe winners of the 2019 Best Anthropomorphic Artwork Awards have been announced! There are too many wonderful pieces to show here, so if you have the time, check out the complete list in their Google doc. (Some mild NSFW content.)

The judge's choice winner for 2019 is "Commission for SammyTheTanuki" by Ira-Arn!

And the people's choice winner, which beat the other contenders by a wide margin, is
"Painters" by BubbleWolf.

The other two finalists were "Wildflower" by Neonhorns, and "Adventure awaits!" by Hitmore. There were four runners-up to this category, and over twenty contenders on top of those! A special merit award was given to "Courage on Two Wheels", in honor of Dogbomb.

It's almost time for the 2019 Best Anthropomorphic Artwork Awards!
Tue 24 Dec 2019 - 16:32

Art by Ilya Royz.When it comes to furry artwork, I love to see creativity in detail, mood, backgrounds, world-building and species. I don't follow specific artists, and the high-quality stuff is scattered all over the place, so most of the time I rely on stumbling across artwork I like by accident. Or I find an artist on Fur Affinity who's very good, look at their favorites, and explore sideways. So it's a nice surprise at this time of year to be reminded of the Best Anthropomorphic Artwork Awards, which gives me a fresh starting-point from which to discover new works!

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WowNow - A whole bunch of animated films to avoid
Wed 13 Nov 2019 - 14:56

I had some friends over recently, both furry and dragon fans, to show them a retro and entertainingly stupid 1991 anime mini-movie called Capricorn. We poked holes and made fun of it. The following day, in a spirit of— amicable masochism I guess, my friend Dav treated me to the recent movie trailer for A Dragon Adventure:

Confused and somewhat alarmed by the quality levels, I started to look into where it came from.

I am well-aware that computer-animated films with talking animals are churned out all over the world, and most of them are of pretty terrible quality. The theory is that kids will watch anything. So if you believe that, then who cares about quality? Just work on a small budget and make money. What I hadn't done was to take a look down this particular rabbit hole. Now, having done so, I regret it.

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Comic review: "Can I Pet Your Werewolf?"
Thu 31 Oct 2019 - 19:50

Can I Pet Your Werewolf? is a 160-page comics anthology that came out in 2017, after a successful kickstarter by Kel McDonald. Recently there was a second kickstarter to make a new print run, so I got in on the PDF version, and my hardcopy should be shipping pretty soon.

The project is described as "A light-hearted anthology featuring tales of friendship, family, and romance shared between those who get hairy under a full moon. Just because they have sharp teeth and claws doesn't mean they have to be a monster out for blood."

There are 13 stories, black and white, from mostly women cartoonists of many backgrounds and art styles. They're short popcorn tales, ranging from 8 to 19 pages in length. Not a lot of time for deep world-building, but in each one you're seeing a personal little snippet of a larger setting.