Tony Babel

Tony Babel was born in Israel. His parents are from Tbilisi, Georgia. He has spent time in Moscow, and he lives near Tel Aviv with his wife and cats. In a February 2022 profile he said he had worked in motion, graphic design, and animation for 16 years. About six years before that profile, he went back to the cartoon style he had loved as a child.

He is a Disney and Fleischer fan. He remembers pausing VHS tapes to draw a character he liked, and he was fascinated by the older rubber-hose cartoons. He started on paper. At about ten he moved to a mouse and MS Paint, and he still draws with a mouse, now in Adobe Illustrator. A picture usually begins as a rough sketch, for the layout. Then he designs the characters on the screen, and sometimes starts the animation before the drawing is finished. He has aphantasia, which he describes as the absence of a mental picture. He works from a gut feeling of what he wants the scene to do, and he lets the piece move away from the first idea.

The series in that profile is Vintage Addictions, a set of loops about the consequences of different addictions. He calls it a social commentary brought to life with lively animation. Check Please and Lucky Stroke are among the loops, and the loops were published on SuperRare. The vintage cartoon is the picture: wide eyes, a rubber-hose limb, and a loop that keeps turning.