ROUGE Collective: Standing Upright in 2025
If ROUGE Collective was looking in a mirror, 2025 was the year it noticed it had bones now. A rig. Some structure. Still a little awkward, but standing upright.
We're still the new kid in Southeast Asia's animation scene. More ideas than we know what to do with, learning as we grow. But this was the year our initial "what if?" started turning into "oh damn, we're actually doing this."
Stories We Told in 2025
How Bali Became Bali.
Created for SAKA Museum, this live-action and animation hybrid tells the story of Bali’s origins. We blended real footage with animation to trace defining moments like Mount Batur’s eruption and the development of the subak irrigation system. By bringing histories into an immersive museum experience, we made these foundational stories accessible to both local audiences and visitors from around the world in a way that feels fresh, visual, and grounded in culture.
Sang Kancil for Sustainable Travel
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
We brought the classic character of Sang Kancil into a modern conversation about sustainable travel. In this animated series, the mouse-deer acts as a guide for mindful travel, showing the real impact tourism has on our local ecosystems. It allowed us to use a familiar character to communicate sustainability in a way that feels approachable and relevant today.
Jalan Arif
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Learning sticks when it’s rooted in story. Jalan Arif follows the friendship between Arif, a Bornean elephant, and Ahmad, an oil palm worker, to educate viewers about elephant behaviour and human-wildlife coexistence. Reaching over 200,000 people in local communities, the series shows how storytelling can drive awareness and build respect in shared environments.
Moments That Mattered
This year took us beyond our screens and into conversations that mattered.
Thomas joined Animated for Impact at Bangkok Climate Action Week, sharing ROUGE's perspective on animation's power to create emotional resonance around climate and nature stories. Vann participated in the Animating Tomorrow panel at Singapore's Cartoons Underground Festival, joining industry leaders for honest conversations on building sustainable creative careers and thriving in an evolving animation landscape.
These moments reinforced that animation isn’t just about the work itself, but about the conversations it opens up and the communities it connects.
The B-Corp Journey: Honest Reflections
In December, we became B Corp certified, the first animation studio in Asia to earn it.
The process took over 100 hours and forced us to confront questions we'd been avoiding: What does "impact" actually mean for our studio? How do we measure it? Are we doing enough?
The framework isn’t perfect, but it gave us something we didn’t have before. A structured way to think about our impact, and a clearer sense of accountability in how we work. It’s not a final answer, but it’s a solid starting point.
What We're Carrying Into 2026
2025 taught us a few things we won't forget:
Impact isn't always loud.
Sometimes it's a quarter million people feeling something from a story. Sometimes it's consistent work for Southeast Asian makers throughout the year. Sometimes it's just showing up, week after week, to do the work that matters.
Frameworks help, even when they're imperfect.
B-Corp didn't solve everything. But it gave us language, structure, and a community asking similar questions. Progress over perfection, every time.
Community is foundational.
The conversations at Bangkok Climate Action Week, the connections at Singapore's festival, the clients who came back and said "let's do that again", none of this happens in isolation. We build better when we build together.
To our clients, partners, and makers:
Thanks for trusting us when we were still figuring things out.
Thanks for coming back and saying "let's do that again."
Thanks for building this with us.
If 2025 was about standing upright…
2026 is about actually walking somewhere interesting.
More stories. More experiments. More work that matters.
And yes, more glorious chaos!
