Ratboy Genius
View the ratboygenius YouTube channel.
Ratboy Genius is hard to describe. It's a musical. Sometimes they sing about things like presidents, and looking both ways when you cross the street, or food like potato knishes. (Honestly, if you've spent any time online ever, you've probably heard that potato knishes song.) Other times, they'll be singing about intergalactic wars, discussing the electric universe theory, all while hopping between different timelines. It gets deeper and more complex the further you look. You'd never guess it just by looking.
If you want to give it a try, you can start watching from the very, very beginning. However, I think it's easiest for newcomers to start with the "Ratboy Dreams Minecraft" series, then watch "The Flood", then watch "Starship Genius". From there, you'll have seen what most of the fandom content centers around. "Happyman on the Red Planet and George" is not as essential to understanding what the fandom centers on, but is also worth a watch. It contextualizes a decent amount of things from Starship Genius and has some of the best songs in the series.
Röckët Stähr's Death of a Rockstar
View the promotional website for the Death of a Rockstar movie.
Death of a Rockstar is a fully animated rock opera made by one guy, about the future where rock and roll is outlawed. It is absurdly impressive for what it is, and what it is is a pretty damn good movie with a great soundtrack that doesn't feel soundtrack-y at all. You will catch me listening to this in my car with the windows down. It was animated by, like I said, one guy over the span of eight years, and the amount of love and care that was put into the scoring, the singing, the instrumentals, and the art is impressive enough to get you to watch it just by that. But no, it's an honestly fun watch. Check out the link to buy it above, there's some previews of the song and animation on there that you can watch for free. "60s Summer Heartbreak" is my personal favorite from the bunch.
The Adam Hendrickson Show
View the promotional website for the Death of a Rockstar movie.
I think we have a theme of animated music-related things going on here. This one, I have been following for probably the least amount of time, but found pretty interesting from what I have seen thus far, follows Adam Hendrickson who is searching for a soundtrack to one of his favorite shows, The Victorians. Like the above shows, the sound track is all-original and was created for this show and it's pretty neat. It gave me slight Gravity Falls vibes, or some other Disney show. But still super neat and charming, and I really look forward to more episodes of this in the future.
17776
On April 7th, 2026 humanity stops aging, stops dying, and stops being born. This is a story about what American football will look like in the future, told from the point of view of three space satellites. I read it really recently with the passing of April 7th, 2026 bring more eyes to the project. It's a relatively short read (will take you only two or three hours) but is a fun and gratifying read. I also thought the theme (and I wouldn't really consider this a spoiler, but if you would prefer to go in as blind as possible, skip this part) of humanity needing stuff to keep them busy and to keep them human, rejecting things created to make their life as easy as possible, is especially pertinent to the widespread AI usage you see from people today.
Welcome to Hell
This is a student film that most people have seen if they spent any time online in the animation community anywhere from 2013 - 2017. It's about Sock Sowachowski, a kid who killed his parents, being reborn as a demon and being tasked by Mephistopheles himself to convince apathetic Jonathan Combs to kill himself. It's a classic. There is not much more I have to say to this other than I have been very attatched to this ten minute YouTube video for a very long time.