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‘Just Keep Going Bro’: Behind The ‘Pixel-Esque’ Process Of Sleepy Ghost’s Viral Animation
Digital-native animator Sleepy Ghost didn’t come to animation through film school or a traditional visual arts background. He arrived sideways, through music, burnout, and a browser-based pixel art app during the early months of the pandemic.
“I started a little after COVID, I think it was in 2021, making pixel art,” he tells Cartoon Brew. “That’s when I first started, I guess, animation in general. I used to only make music. Just beats.”
Pressures to establish his own identity in the crowded world of digital music led the artist to seek another entirely non-commercial creative outlet. “I was getting really burnt out from music, or maybe just trying to make it as a brand within music.” At first, he would just play in browser-based pixel art engines for half an hour a day, but over time, animating became the thing he looked forward to during his free time. “Slowly, it started turning into like a multi-hour thing I would just do every single day. When I’m leaving my day job, all I’m thinking about is getting home and doing this.”
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By 2022, he was posting regularly under the name Sleepy Ghost. “I thought it was kind of goofy and funny,” he says of the name, preferring to keep his real identity separate from his online nom de plume. “I just liked the way it sounded.” What followed was a steady stream of looping animations, pixel or pixel-adjacent figures dancing, walking, and swaying, typically set to music he composed himself.
Rhythm And Resolution
“I don’t think consciously, at least not at the beginning,” he says, when asked if his background as a musician informed his animation. “But I do think there’s a sense of rhythm that’s kind of intuitive between the two.”
He recalls a studio anecdote from Pharrell Williams about drums: “The kick makes you bounce; the snare makes your head snap,” he recalls. That distinction, different kinds of impact, eventually became something of an animation principle and can be seen as well as heard in a lot of Sleepy Ghosts’ work.
“I like to have my characters react to kicks and snares very differently,” he explains. “The snare should have a certain pop that the kick doesn’t have.”
Technically, much of his work is animated on twos. “I just think it looks the best,” he says. “It has a certain degree of choppiness, but it still seems smooth. There’s an impressionistic quality to it where the viewer kind of fills in the rest of the motion.”
Pixel-Esque
While often labeled pixel art, Sleepy Ghost is careful with that definition. His earliest animations were made in rudimentary tools, capped at around 10 frames per second. More recently, moving over to an iPad for his animating expanded his setup, if not his aesthetic.
“I still draw on small canvases,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s technically pixel anymore, but it’s like pixel-esque. Maybe in a Nintendo DS Flipnote kind of way.”
The appeal was never technical mastery. “I just kind of liked making little dudes dance,” he says. “That was really fun.”
Whimsy As Resistance
There’s a consistent emotional tone across Sleepy Ghost’s work. It’s often gentle, melancholic, quietly uplifting. That tone has sharpened as generative AI floods creative platforms.
“I want to make things as non-AI-centric as possible,” he says. “Something that I don’t think any artificial neural network could possibly come up with. Just a little whimsical. Slightly outside the box.”
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That sensibility isn’t simply performative; it’s personal.
“Oh my god, yeah, absolutely,” he says when asked whether the work helps him get through difficult days. “This is kind of the main thing really keeping me going right now.”
He doesn’t hedge the statement. “It gives me motivation… a reason to keep living.”
“Just Keep Going Bro”
Sleepy Ghost’s first major viral moment came from an unassuming loop: a Gen-2-style pixel Gengar trudging sadly to the right. The caption read: “JUST KEEP GOING BRO.”
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“That was my first piece to hit any notoriety,” he says. “It got a couple million views. I went from like 5,000 followers to 25,000 almost overnight and I was like, ‘What the hell?’”
The message mirrored the process. “You literally just… keep going,” he laughs.
Another surge followed with a Kendrick Lamar–Knuckles mashup that spawned TikTok recreations. “There were literally teenagers doing the actions I animated in real life on TikTok,” he says. “I couldn’t believe it.”
The attention didn’t change his finances, he notes, but it did reframe his sense of scale. “It was cool to realize something I made could actually impact people.”
What’s Next
Despite a quarter-million Instagram followers and millions of views, Sleepy Ghost remains cautiously ambitious. His goals include a small RPG-style game, longer animated shorts with original characters, and another album of self-produced music.
“I have an Apple Note with like a billion things I want to do,” he says, before cautiously adding, “If you try to force things, I just feel like it doesn’t work.”
For now, he animates wherever he can at cafés, between shifts, after dinner, guided by rhythm more than metrics.
“I still get excited,” he says. “Even driving to work, I’m like, ‘Man, I can’t wait to work on this thing.’”
That impulse, to just keep going, bro, without guarantees, is the energy that flows through Sleepy Ghost’s work. Sometimes nostalgic, occasionally viral, but always forward-looking and deeply personal.