2025 was a bit of a deviation for Chicken Fruit.
Our yearly wrap-up posts from the previous few years have had two main themes:
We can’t talk about the main project that has been paying our bills yet! It’s a mobile app! That’s all we can say 🤐
We’ve been making a short film! Or, in last year’s post: We just finished making our short film!
Happily, this year we actually have a bit more to cover! But let’s do one last dip into those two first.
Loneliness & Laundry
We had a bit of a confusing run with our short film.
We started off our festival journey with a string of rejections, which was disheartening. We’d spent years and years making this film, and some of the first people to ever see it didn’t want to include it in their festival line-up.
Obviously there are loads of reasons why films get rejected from festivals – they don’t fit the theme! there are other similar films already in the programme! we’ve got into a fight with one of the staff members on social media because they promoted AI! – but we couldn’t help but be a bit sad about it.
Then, for the first few months of 2025, we were lucky enough to have a waterfall of acceptances! Not only that – awards! Quite a few of them! Perhaps the first load of rejections was just a fluke, we told ourselves. Maybe from then on we’d get into basically everything we submitted to!
But nope – after we got back from Brighton Animation Festival, we got rejected by almost everything else we’d submitted for.
We may never know why Dec 2024–March 2025 brought nothing but success for Loneliness & Laundry, while the rest of the time it didn’t do much at all. Perhaps the allure of warm, dry clothes is just too powerful in the cold months? Either way, we’re so grateful for the times we did get to share it with other people, and for the other films we saw and the people we met on the journey!
With our festival run almost definitely over now, we’re looking forward to releasing Loneliness & Laundry online in the next few months! Until then, please do take the time to check out the incredible soundtrack done by Eli Rainsberry – including the full lofi track that our main character listens to halfway through the film.
Rocky Road
We spent three years working with the team at Rocky Road to develop assets for a mobile game.
Over the years, the game had many forms and genres that we were lucky enough to make things for: from characters to background paintings, game assets to graphic designs. However last year, the game pivoted one more time into something that didn’t need any of our work at all.
This meant we got to spend the latter half of 2025 finally sharing some of the bits we’d made – and, in going through the archive of our time on the project, found that we had enough material to compile into a 100-page art book, which we had printed and sent to the team in Iceland as a memento of our beautiful time together.
And now, finally, onto projects new to 2025!
Mermaids
We kicked off the year working with the charity Mermaids, who support trans, non-binary and gender diverse children, teens and their families.
This was a wonderful project to work on. Not only did we get to make a fun, colourful, celebratory animation with a diverse cast of characters, but we got to do it in support of a cause we believe in. And it wasn’t even the only queer charity we got to work with last year!
Galop @ Outernet
Probably the project that defines last year the most for us was working with anti-LGBTQ+ hate charity Galop to make an installation for the Outernet in Central London.
Playing throughout all of June 2025, the 2-minute, 5-screen immersive animation stretched us as a studio in many new and exciting ways. It was one of those projects that pushed us so hard and required us to ultimately sacrifice a few things that we’d ideally liked to have seen in the final product, so while the animation was playing during Pride Month, it was (ironically) quite hard for us to be proud of what we’d made.
Happily, the Squidgies returned to the Outernet for Hate Crime Awareness Week in October, and by then, we’d had enough time and distance from them that we were able to really enjoy seeing them again.
Jamie Smart
And speaking of things from the past popping back into our lives – when he was in art college, Chicken Fruit director Jonny would make pilgrimages to the Forbidden Planet in Leeds to pick up issues of Bear by comic book artist Jamie Smart. This was long enough ago that any Gen Z readers of this blog might not have even been born.
But in 2025, we got to live Teenage Jonny’s dream and do some animated work in the Jamie Smart universe.
Firstly, we got the opportunity to make a game trailer for the card game Hero Slam. We loved that project – being able to bring Jamie’s characters to life, accompanied by incredible and ear-wormy music by composer Reeder, was so much fun.
We would have been thrilled just with that, but following on from Hero Slam, we were lucky enough to work on two trailers for Jamie Smart books, plus an animated short film introduction to be shown at Jamie Smart live events. This last one was a particular treat – we got to animate a whole range of Jamie’s characters, plus a little Jamie himself.
Disney+ @ Printworks
And speaking of getting to play with characters we didn’t actually make: throughout the final chunk of the year, we worked with the very lovely and talented crew at Copperworks Studio on two projects – one of these was an installation at the Printworks in Manchester City Centre for Disney+.
(Fun fact: when Matt from Copperworks was first talking to us about this project, he referred to it as “something for a major streamer”. Because our brains have been rotted by being terminally online, we thought it was a project for someone who plays games on Twitch. But no… streamer… streaming platform… that does make more sense.)
The Printworks project was another one that went through quite a few evolutions before it landed where it did. Luckily, the Copperworks team are a joy to work with, so this was a good thing, as it meant we got to extend our time collaborating with them.
In the end, we were tasked with making a DeepScreen™ effect on the Pump Yard ceiling of the Printworks, giving the impression that various Disney characters were bursting through the screen. As well as this, the other huge ceiling screens would have their own immersive character moments, making a big, cohesive Disney+ takeover.
This played at the Printworks in December, which was handy for us for two reasons:
Because both Chicken Fruit team members are from up north, we got to tie in a cheeky Christmas visit on the company card 🤭
We were also working on a project that required us to attend a live-action shoot in the area. We can’t talk about that one properly yet – hopefully within the next few months – but here’s a cheeky preview:
HMRC app
The other project we got to work on with Copperworks was a TV ad for the HMRC app. In comparison to the intensive Printworks job, this was a quick, fun one: we made a 3D phone jump around a coffee shop counter while it extolled the virtues of making tax digital.
As it happens, the coffee shop was also in Manchester – so while we were up north, we got to do a little pilgrimage there, too. Not sure we could have made that Christmas trip home any more efficient, tbh.
Social (media)
It’s a tragic reality these days that most people who are self-employed have to dip their toes into occasionally being a social media marketing manager. This is very cruel, especially when your field of employment is animation, and your industry’s standard output is a full week’s work for mere seconds of video content.
However, this year, we’ve once again tried to give it a go, trying to dredge up the will to care about things like thumbnails and hooks and grid cohesion.
Happily, this has meant that we’ve been able to try out new skills in the name of actually posting something – like this umbrella-stealing robot or this collaboration with incredible paper engineer Julia Yus.
We doubt we’ll ever want to pivot to being influencey – nor indeed do we have the skillset to do so – but we’re definitely a little bit happier with how our instagram profile looks this year.
Social(ising) + AI
As we briefly mentioned in our spring world tour post, this year we plunged back into the world of doing things in person, after managing to extend our Covid lockdown for an extra four years.
This was pretty scary and overwhelming, but the only way we’ll get used to being in rooms full of strangers is by continuing to do it, so once the festivals died down, we tried to keep it up.
Over the latter half of the year, we attended Animated Women UK’s Halloween party, the Get Animated conference, and Playgrounds’ InMotion.
Obviously, meeting people/puppets in person, socialising with your peers and networking with other people in your industry all have many, many benefits. However, one of our favourite things about attending these animation events was the lack of people talking about AI – or, when the topic did come up, there being a strong anti-AI response.
As a studio, Chicken Fruit is firmly anti-generative AI. It has been increasingly isolating and infuriating watching other studios slowly roll out press releases about how they’re incorporating the technology into their workflows.
The initial draft of this post had another four paragraphs from our director Jonny about the many, many issues with AI, but since one of his 2026 resolutions is to stop getting into fights about AI, we’ll keep it there for now – though you can read a little more of his thoughts here. Suffice to say, it was refreshing to be surrounded by people who don’t believe (or aren’t pretending to believe) that there’s any place for stolen and badly regurgitated art in this industry.
2026
As well as cutting down on the AI fights, another of our 2026 goals is to finally make good on our vow to eventually learn Blender.
This is the one of the reasons we’re posting our yearly wrap-up post in February; we like to make a little New Year’s animation to go with these, and this year we decided to take the plunge and make it in an entirely new bit of software.
It obviously took a bit more time than usual, and every day we’ve been running into problems we don’t yet know how to solve. But with the help of a few pals also dipping their toes in for the first time, the Cabeza Patata School, and the dream of being able to make the 2027 post’s header in Blender next year and compare the two, we’re excited to see where the software takes us next.
So here’s to another year of pushing ourselves, learning new things, and not allowing the AI bros to get to us! (But also not getting into fights with them on LinkedIn, because that makes The Algorithm promote more of that rubbish.)
Thank you for being here! Peace and love ❤️
Chicken Fruit
