Have You Seen The Paper Puppet Show Animation Trend?

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TikTokers and Youtubers have been making animations, setting their favorite fandom characters in paper puppet wonderlands, set to the song Sinking Town.   Check out our new MEME STORE: https://thememestore.com/  Subscribe to our channel to learn more about trending memes, hear interviews from meme personalities and more! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbrPqq29C9Q_TQP7OFFRzcw?sub_confirmation=1  #meme #memes #memesvideos

Transcript

00:00Have you seen these collage-like animations that look like all the characters are cut from paper?

00:04This new animation trend is blowing up on YouTube and TikTok,

00:08showing nearly every fandom you can think of as cardboard or paper puppets putting on a show.

00:12The animators cleverly create detailed-looking paper textures with crinkles and shadows,

00:17and they're all set to the Japanese song Sinking Town by Yoako Kurahashi.

00:30But how did the animation trend kick off?

00:34While Kurahashi's song was released in 2002,

00:37the first notable fan-made music video for it was uploaded to YouTube in 2019.

00:41The video told a story using a 2D animation style,

00:44and garnered around 2 million views over the course of 6 years.

00:47Then in May of 2025,

00:49TikToker MDKM444 posted an animation set to the song based on the cookie-run video games,

00:55in which everything is animated as if part of a paper-made play,

00:58racking up over a million views in about a month.

01:01The trend caught on and continued to spread throughout May,

01:03gaining major traction in June of 2025,

01:06as animators throughout all kinds of different fandoms took on the challenge,

01:10making it appear as if they'd cut out paper dolls,

01:12reimagining the worlds of their favorite characters and IPs as 2D wonderlands.

01:16For instance, some of the more viral videos following the trend are this Five Nights at Freddy's version,

01:21this Minecraft version, and this Naruto one.

01:24TikTokers would start to compile and rank their favorite iterations of the trend,

01:27fueling it to spread even further.

01:29While the animations intend to look more crude and simple due to their cut-and-paste style,

01:33it actually takes a lot of work to give them that appearance.

01:36As TikToker yourfellowtraveler captioned their video,

01:39this trend drained me.

01:40Some users would post versions of the trend using footage of actual cut paper puppets,

01:45like TikToker DogeT Fox,

01:46whose Dark Mango Psychology version of the trend accumulated nearly 2 million views in just 3 days.

01:51This animation trend comes just a few months after another that had animators recreating a performance

01:57of the Malcolm Todd song,

01:58Chest Pain I Love by this avatar from the video game Repo.

02:02This trend blew up,

02:03with versions garnering tens of millions of views.

02:05These animation trends are a great way for animators to show off their skills

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