Tony Babel is a self-taught designer, illustrator and animator,who creates short, vintage-style animated loops.His work revives the rubbery, exaggerated look of 1930s Rubber Hose cartoons,pairing that nostalgic style with sharp, often pointed commentary on modern, particularly web3, culture.
Growing up, Babel spent hours drawing and rewinding old cartoons on tape, an obsession that shaped his visual style long before he became an animator.He spent nearly a decade in professional motion design, including work with Disney and other major brands, before finding the confidence to revisit the retro animation style that had first captivated him. Babel has aphantasia, the inability to form mental images, and has described art as the only outlet for his thinking.Each loop begins as a pen-and-paper sketch, is drawn in Illustrator with a computer mouse,,and is animated in After Effects using Shape Layers.
Before entering the NFT space, Babel built a following on Instagram with his vintage-style loops, then revived a long-dormant Twitter account to bring his art into web3.Loops such as Escalator to Hell and Dirty Dancing pair a period animation style with a hidden narrative twist beneath their playful surface.His work HELLFLUENCER, his first release on the Solana blockchain,turns that same cheerful, nostalgic style toward the manipulative, audience-preying side of web3 influencer culture.Babel has grouped later loops into series such as Vintage Editions and Vintage Distortions.One work in the Vintage Editions series is the 1/1 animation March of The Broken, which Babel has described as “a subtle, melancholic animation symbolizing loss”.The Vintage Distortions series opened in January 2026 with the open edition Fuck The Algo, released through Manifold.
