The best nonprofit animations of October 2026 include videos from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the American Cancer Society, TED-Ed and Partners Against Mortality in Epilepsy.
Fitting for Halloween month, although the most gruesome thing on this list is a mouth that hasn't met a toothbrush in a year. The rest are about quieter things: DNA drifting in seawater, the nerves before a mammogram, and the risk of premature death in epilepsy.
Best NGO Animation
FAO's "Inside the GFCM's surveys at sea: technology to advance monitoring"
The GFCM is the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean, which works under the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Looking after the Mediterranean and Black Sea starts with finding out what lives there.
This NGO animation shows three ways to do it: a weighted net dragged across the seabed, underwater robots, and environmental DNA (eDNA), where species are identified from the genetic traces they leave in the water. That last one is the surprise…
Scientists collect seawater through a gauze-filled device and read the sea itself. The video is careful to present the newer tools as complements to net surveys, not replacements.
The animation has a painterly, cut-paper look, with grainy textures, irregular edges and layered underwater scenes in deep blues and teals. A side-on view linking the vessel, towing lines and seabed net makes the whole process easy to follow.
Best Medical Animation
American Cancer Society's "How to Get Ready for a Mammogram"
Published in Breast Cancer Awareness Month, this forty-second medical animation starts by acknowledging that people are nervous, and only then gets practical: when to schedule the appointment, what to wear, and what to do if you're worried about pain.
One illustrated woman guides viewers through recognisable places: a bathroom, a wardrobe, an examination room. Close-ups of a phone calendar and a piece of clothing turn advice into things you can actually do.
The flat 2D style has a hand-drawn finish, and the vivid blue, navy, lavender and coral palette matches the charity's own branding.
The script doesn't promise it will be painless. It says: "If you feel pain, speak up." It's a small line, but it hands a nervous patient some control over the appointment.
Best Educational Animation
TED-Ed's "What if you didn't brush your teeth for a year?"
It opens with a joke about ten out of ten dentists, then asks the question nobody should test: what if you just didn't? With over a million views and counting, plenty of people clearly wanted the answer.
Over an imagined year, friendly microbes lose ground to destructive ones. Oz Animation made it in clay stop-motion, with visible fingerprints and microbes with oversized eyes and exaggerated mouths. The narrator, meanwhile, is a photographed skeleton sitting casually in a furnished room, which suits a video published two days before Halloween.
The closing rhyme sums up the advice: brush for two minutes twice a day to "keep the pathobionts at bay", the video's name for the troublemaker microbes. Viewers noticed the timing too: "Just in time for Halloween." Another had a plan: "This is gonna terrify my nephew into brushing his teeth thank you."
Health advice rarely comes with a skeleton and a rhyme. Maybe it should.
Best Healthcare Animation
Partners Against Mortality in Epilepsy (PAME) (Leon! Animations)
This one is ours, and it's our second epilepsy animation this year, after the BAND Foundation's "Epilepsy in Africa".
Partners Against Mortality in Epilepsy is a collaborative initiative housed within the American Epilepsy Society, uniting people living with epilepsy, bereaved families, clinicians and researchers. It opens with two stats: more than 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy, and they are up to three times more likely to die prematurely than the general population.
This charity animation is serious without being bleak: soft, flat 2D in mint, cream and blue, with purple, teal and coral accents from PAME's brand colours. Characters span ages, skin tones and cultures, and accident scenes show the risk without anything graphic.
The film moves from the problem to partnership, and the line that sums it up is: "Because together, we can save lives." It ends with an invitation and QR code to join the PAME community.
What These Nonprofit Animations Teach Us
Nonprofit animation can make technical science tangible. The GFCM didn't boil its subject down to a slogan. It showed the net, the robot and the water sample, and let viewers see how each fits.
Medical animation works best when it admits the worry first. The American Cancer Society started with nerves, not instructions, and told viewers to speak up if it hurts.
Educational animation earns attention with a question people want answered. "But what if you just… didn't (brush your teeth)?" is a better opening than any list of dental facts.
Charity animation can handle a hard subject without turning bleak. PAME names a serious risk, then gives people a way to act on it.
Catch up on our 2026 nonprofit animation roundups: January | February | March |April | May | June | July | August | September.
Or explore the archive: Best Nonprofit Videos of All Time.
What's Leon! Animation Studio Up To?
Our 2D animation studio has just wrapped the Partners Against Mortality in Epilepsy animation you read about above. The Médecins Sans Frontières video is done too, so stay tuned: it will feature in our blogs soon.
We're also working on two further NHS animation projects for Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust's Women's and Girls' Health Hub, one now at the animation stage and the other also progressing well. Our work for the University of the West of England on rare autoimmune conditions is moving along well too.
Our charity animation studio makes non-profit animation, charity videos, healthcare animation and NHS animation for organisations whose messages deserve to be heard. If yours is one of them, let's talk.
