Best Nonprofit Animated Videos of 2025 (November)
November sits in that weird spot, too late for Halloween, too early for Christmas. The second-to-last month of the year, when most people are already checked out.
These three charity videos showed up anyway. Let teenagers sleep in. Save the Amazon with stop-motion clay. Should we text aliens? From circadian rhythms to rainforest fires to signals we might regret sending—three nonprofit animations that trusted their audiences with the complicated stuff.
Best Healthcare Animation
TED-Ed's "What lack of sleep does to the teenage brain"
Waking a teenager at 6 a.m. is the biological equivalent of waking an adult at 4 a.m.
That single line, delivered by sleep researcher Wendy Troxel in this Laura Jayne Hodkin-animated healthcare video, reframes everything. Teenagers aren't lazy. Their brains run on a different clock, and we're forcing them to operate during biological nighttime.
The animation matches the chaos: hand-drawn 2D with thick outlines and exaggerated anatomy. Exhausted teenagers stretch into rubber-limbed zombies. Stress glows in scribbles. Deep blues signal mental fog, neon pinks pulse with overstimulation.
At 880,000+ views, this healthcare animation lands the numbers: 1 in 10 teens gets recommended sleep. Lost sleep increases sadness by 38%, suicide attempts by 58%. Five hours of sleep? Legally drunk.
One commenter cut through decades of policy inertia: "'I survived it' is the worst excuse in the world for not changing something."
Districts that shifted to 8:30 a.m. starts saw a 70% reduction in car crashes. This isn't about convenience. It's public safety hiding in a school schedule.
Bonus healthcare animation:
TED-Ed released another healthcare animation this month about leg lengthening surgery for limb length discrepancy. One viewer captured it: "Watching this made my legs hurt." That wince is the point. Over 280,000 people now understand why this slow, precise surgery, 1mm of bone growth per day, offers patients hope for normal life.
Best NGO Animation
Greenpeace's "Protecting nature is protecting ourselves"
A macaw family builds a nest. Chicks hatch. The forest hums with life. Then fire.
Edgar Alvarez's wordless stop-motion clay animation for Greenpeace tells the Amazon deforestation story in 60 seconds. Hand-sculpted macaws, hand-sculpted trees, hand-sculpted flames. Fingerprints still visible in every frame.
The aesthetic is storybook warmth: rich greens, saturated blues and reds, soft focus suggesting miniature dioramas. Then the shift. Animation to real footage of actual flames. The clay world wasn't metaphor. It was memory of what existed before we burned it.
Two lines of text appear: "I thought we'd be safe here." and "Our future depends on the Amazon, no matter where we call home."
At 165,000+ combined views, one comment captured it: "I wish everybody could feel safe, wherever they live."
This NGO animation ends with a simple call: "Add your voice to protect the Amazon." One minute that makes rainforest destruction feel exactly like what it is… home, burning.
Best Educational Animation
The Royal Society's "Should we try to talk to aliens?"
In 1974, we sent the Arecibo Message into space. Fifty years later: silence.
The Tin Bear Project's animation explores whether that silence is lucky, or whether we should be shouting louder. The video presents actual scientists with opposing views: SETI researchers who listen cautiously versus METI advocates who want to broadcast Earth's location across the galaxy.
The animation blends painterly space environments with bold cartoon characters and neon abstract sequences. Star fields have atmospheric grain. Aliens hold "oh hi!" signs.
The debate is real: Who speaks for Earth? What if hostile civilisations intercept our message? One scientist offers a memorable metaphor: "We're trying to be the galactic giraffes here."
One commenter nailed the stakes: "Let's try to communicate with humans first, and maybe with sea mammals."
This educational animation doesn't solve the debate. It invites you into it.
What These Nonprofit Animations Teach Us
Trust your audience with complexity. Six minutes on sleep policy. An unresolved alien debate. One minute of clay and flames. Over a million combined views prove audiences reward depth over dumbing down.
Short isn't shallow. Greenpeace proved 60 seconds of clay can say more than three minutes of voiceover, data, and orchestral swells.
Visuals did the work. Rubber-limbed teens showed exhaustion. Clay forest felt like home. Cartoon aliens kept cosmic questions human-scale.
Missed our earlier 2025 roundups? Catch up on January, February, March, April, May, June, August, September, and October.
What's Leon! Animation Studio Up To?
Our charity animation studio just delivered two healthcare explainers for the British Heart Foundation (one about ICDs, another about pacemakers) now live on their YouTube channel. We're currently animating a third for them: How Your Heart Works. Complex cardiology made clear.
You just read about sleep policy, burning forests, and galactic questions without checking out. Your message deserves that same respect.
