Our animation studio’s charity history
When we started Chicken Fruit in 2019, we made a promise to ourselves.
Sometimes we think we have the best job in the world. Not only do we get to do what we love every day, but we don’t even have a boss to tell us what to do.
Unfortunately, that also means that we don’t have a boss to tell us what to do. We have to figure out everything from work/life balance to social media strategy to the projects we work on all by ourselves.
So that was our promise: even though we have to worry about boring business things like “can we afford rent this month?”, we wanted to make sure we were always doing…good.
To that end, we pledged:
to offer a discounted rate for charities and non-profits
to donate every tenth animation project to a good cause, completely free
at the end of every financial year, see what we can afford, and make a lump sum donation to a cause we care about.
And, happily, over the last seven years we’ve managed to stick to all three of these goals.
Chicken Fruit at Galop’s Hate Hurts All Of Us campaign at the Outernet in 2025
But it’s more than just the fuzzy feelings of telling ourselves we’re not evil capitalist scumbags: working on animations or motion graphics for charities and non-profits is actually one of our favourite things about being an independent studio.
Not only does it make us feel like our job is occasionally a bit more than just making cartoons or making big bucks (haha 🥲), but because the causes behind projects like that are so important, they require a really high level of care and attention to make sure we’re getting everything exactly right.
Like having to double check with a science team that a particular fish is definitely found at a certain depth of ocean for a campaign launch – or having to run scenes in a social media animation by an advisory panel to make sure we’re representing an experience accurately – or needing to consult a medical professional to make sure a kids’ explainer video is the right mix of accurate, gory and non-traumatising.
All of those processes remind us to put the same level of care and attention into every project we do.
Last month, we were lucky enough to make a small animation for the campaign launch of Greenpeace’s upcoming ROV expedition to the Deep Arctic, and it was just as much of a valuable process as it always is.
We really hope we get the chance to continue our streak with working with charities and non-profits – of course because of all the reasons we talked about above, but also because people who devote their working lives to making the world a better place are usually really lovely and make our inbox at least 30% more pleasant. (There is an unfortunate amount of boring businessy emails involved in running a studio. Who knew?)
And until the next project, we’ll keep doing what we can to contribute some good in our own way. Even if that is just making cartoons.
