A Montreal Artist Is Keeping Classical Hand-Drawn Animation Alive By Tattooing It Onto People
Forget pencil and paper: one Montreal artist has taken to animating with needle and ink. Phil Berge has been creating animation from tattoos for years — and he’s inviting his fellow citizens to take part.
The process is simple. Berge, a tattoo artist by trade, inks each frame of a short animation cycle onto a different person (the people generally don’t know each other). He takes a shot of each frame, strings them together, and voilà. The artist recently attracted attention on Tiktok with a video compilation demonstrating his process:
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The video, which has amassed over 2.3 million views to date, explains his current, and most ambitious, animation project to date: a 60-frame cycle of Koko the Clown dancing from the 1933 Fleischer cartoon Snow-White. As of this week, he had completed 54 of the frames.
There are plenty more examples of Berge’s artwork on his Youtube channel. In some cases, the entire cycle is tattooed onto one person, as in this loop of Felix the Cat: