Bender 3D
Pure entry, blender 3.6 cycles. I was going to add some smoke and falling ashes but I fear that would take too much time, and remove from the quality instead of add. Might get some social media clout, due to the recognizability of the character.
I noticed the CGboost challenges have become focused on animation projects, and they are pretty fussy about the quality of the submissions. They recently started a robotic wildlife challenge. Almost seems similar to this one 
If the challenge was an image, I would have jumped on it, alas I feel like I’m currently too busy to animate anything…