What is Furry?
What is Furry?
Gosh! It's really hard to explain this furry thing. I mean I'm a furry, which kinda means I'm an animal with human-like characteristics, but I'm not really all that good at explaining this. My alter-ego, who is also named Patrick is much better at things like that. Take it away.
Thank you very much, my furry friend. Let's start with what I know best, art and illustration.
Furry Art
First of all, furry art is just a clever play-on-words nickname for anthropomorphic art. This is an art form that grew out of high fantasy art, found in illustrations by such greats as the Brothers Hildebrandt, Gary Lippincott, Larry Elmore, H. R. Giger, Frank Kelly Freas, Michael Whelan, and Ralph McQuarrie. It is a diverse genre. It can be ultra-realistic, cartoony, or something in-between. Although, most see the furry art genre as out of the mainstream, the fare of furry fandom conventions and websites, a literary and art oddity. Anthropomorphic art is as mainstream as the books you see in Barnes and Nobles or the DVD's you find in Blockbusters. Animals with human characteristics and personalities have been a part of storytelling for thousands of years. In just the past 100 to 150 years, it has been made a part of everyday storytelling, aimed at all ages, creeds, and cultures. It's in the comic strip in the newspaper with the Sopwith Camel-flying beagle named Snoopy from Peanuts to the tiger, Hobbes in Calvin and Hobbes. It's in the TV and movie cartoons we see, from Mickey and Minnie to Bugs Bunny to Scooby-Doo to Courage the Cowardly Dog. It's in popular children's books, such as Arthur. It's even in video games such as Sly Cooper and Sonic, the Hedgehog. As for my version of furry art, I see it as a combination of high fantasy illustration and the cartoons I grew up on, from the classics by Warner Bros. and Walt Disney and the fluffy animal cartoons of the 1980's with a pinch of Anime. It's a style that I have perfected over the last four years, and it has served me well. It's also a lot of fun to draw an animal with a human-like make up.
Anthros or furries serve well as a storytelling device, because I feel that people see more of themselves in animals that are caricatured with human characteristics. Put an animal in a costume and give them complex human emotions, an audience will readily accept them as real.
It would look a little strange if a real animal suddenly stood up on his or her hind legs and starting speaking and gesturing like a human. It would be too unbelievable. Put a shirt, pants, and shoes on a furry, "and he can swagger around, gesturing and pointing like any ham actor" (from Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life by Oliver Johnston and Frank Thomas).
If your story involves the parody of human activities with animals as the stars of the show, then you are not restricted by an animal's body. Make a few changes to the animal form by giving the characters human-like hands with actual fingers, feet with or without shoes, and a biped's pelvis, and your character may have fur, but the personality will be all human and get the audience to believe in the character and feel for them. With a creative stroke of the pencil, you can create a shy teenaged wolf boy or a teen tigress that will make that same shy wolf boy trip over his own feet as well as his tongue.
The Furry Fandom
For thousands of years, peoples of all cultures have given human characteristics to animals as part of their stories, legends, and myths. In only the past twenty years, the furry fandom, those who have an admiration for this kind of storytelling has gained recognition as a distinct fandom. It is a group that crosses all cultures, all races, all creeds, as it shares a mutual love for these legendary animals that may be a windows into our own souls.
Furry or anthropomorphic fans come from all walks of life, from artists to scientists to accountants. Many may see this as a group that hasn't quite grown up or just plain odd, liking cute funny animals, yet these cute funny animals are a part of our everyday life. One can see them in stories, TV, cartoons, commercials, as mascots of sports teams, examples too numerous to name. We even give our pets humanity, talking to them and hoping they will answer back. Furries aren't just for kids. Just ask those great animation directors such as Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett at Warner Bros. Studios in the 1930's and 1940's. Their cartoons weren't meant for the kiddies. They were films aimed at adults. They used satire and complex humor, along with a generous sprinkling of slapstick. Today's furry fan has never forgotten those great animal actors.
Most furry fans would be considered an offshoot of the sci-fi, fantasy, and Anime movements, but sadly, the media has made it a pet project to show all furries as weird and a touch deviant. As the Furry fandom had its roots on the free-wheeling West Coast of the US and the tolerant art community , this sub-culture gained a bad reputation with the public, not helped by mainstream media portrayals of so-called curious behavior on cable outlets such as MTV or in magazines or most recently, on the critically-acclaimed CBS series, CSI.
Despite the overly hyped Hollywood image, the Furry fandom has endured, living through the stares and whispers of the public and the severe scrutiny of the press. Furry fans are artists, animators, scientists, computer programmers, actors, puppeteers, storytellers, writers, etc, average people doing average things during their daily lives. Even, many furries are Christian, yet they are creative and imaginative people that think the world may be a little better if animals could walk and talk as humans do. As Dr. Samuel Conway (AKA Uncle Kage), a chemist by trade and chair of Anthrocon, the East Coast's largest gathering of anthropomorphic fans, artists, and writers, said in a recent article on the convention's web site:
"If you as an adult still occasionally like to flip to the old cartoons, or have a stuffed animal sitting on the dashboard of your car, or buy cereal because it has a cool tiger on the box, you may well enjoy what our fandom has to offer."
Most of all, anthropomorphic art and writing is not as out of the mainstream as one may think. That person, kid or adult that loves Disney or reads Arthur, who knows, may be a furry.
-Patrick "Rangerwolf" Robbins
Sources
Conway, Samuel. "What Anthrocon is all about". www.anthrocon.org, 2004.
Johnston, Oliver M. and Thomas, Frank. Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life. New York: Abbeville Press, 1984.
Patrick Rangerwolf and Briana Sutherland and any and all Midfielders' Club character designs and names and any and all related indicia are (c) 2003 to 2004 to Patrick Robbins. All rights are reserved.