How Big Is Independent Animation, Really?

How Big Is Independent Animation, Really?

Ten independent studios and creators prove that animation can thrive outside Hollywood. The audience is following them.

For most of the last century, an animated series began its life in a conference room. A creator developed an idea and carried a pitch from studio to studio. The goal was to find an executive willing to give the project a green light. Projects that survived that gauntlet entered development, where many languished for years. The system rewarded persistence, but it placed every decision in the hands of a few gatekeepers. For independent animation, that arrangement left almost no path to an audience.

That sequence has quietly flipped. Today’s creators can build an audience first and worry about the conference room later. Independent animators release pilots on YouTube and raise production budgets directly from fans. Others sell merchandise or run subscription communities that fund their work month after month. A few have gone further and built entire studios around a single upload.

The Audience Has Already Voted

Viewers have embraced the shift with real enthusiasm. YouTube’s 2026 Culture & Trends report, titled Animation’s New Wave, measured it directly. Among animation fans aged 14 to 24, 61 percent enjoy independent YouTube series at least as much as studio shows. Meanwhile, 63 percent of that same group watch animated series made for YouTube every week. Those numbers raise a question the industry has only started to ask out loud. How big has independent animation actually become?

No one can offer a single measurement, because no one follows a single model. Some independent productions employ large professional crews. Others begin with one animator working late at night on a laptop. Crowdfunding sustains some projects, while merchandise, memberships, or licensing deals sustain others. The ten examples below cover remarkable ground and sketch an ecosystem far broader than most observers realize.

1. GLITCH Productions and the Scale of the Possible

GLITCH Productions offers the clearest picture of an internet-native studio operating at Hollywood scale. The Australian company produces The Amazing Digital Circus, Murder Drones, and Knights of Guinevere. Each of those titles built a devoted following without a television network behind it. The numbers behind The Amazing Digital Circus alone are staggering. Its pilot crossed 100 million views within a month of its October 2023 release. Since then, total views across the series have passed one billion. By mid-2026, the pilot by itself had climbed to roughly 450 million views.

The series’ significance goes beyond its view counts, however. It showed that an independent property could build a worldwide audience before conventional distribution arrived. The traditional industry eventually came calling, and it came on the creators’ terms. Netflix added the series in October 2024. Then, in June 2026, the final two episodes screened in theaters as The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act. As a result, a studio no longer needs a network or a streamer to find its viewers.

GLITCH, though, represents only one version of independent animation. Its sheer size can obscure the variety of paths other creators have taken. The next studio on this list grew from a very different seed.

2. SpindleHorse and the Studio Built Around a Creator

Vivienne Medrano’s studio, SpindleHorse, became synonymous with Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss. Medrano treated YouTube as a launchpad for ambitious animation rather than a place to post cartoons. Her self-financed Hazbin Hotel pilot arrived in 2019 and quickly gathered more than 111 million views. Its success allowed her to launch Helluva Boss, a companion series set in the same infernal universe. That show went on to build a large following on YouTube.

What happened next rewrote the playbook for internet animation. A24 and Fox’s Bento Box Entertainment produced Hazbin Hotel as a full series. Prime Video premiered it in January 2024, more than four years after the pilot appeared online. In April 2025, the streamer acquired Helluva Boss and signed Medrano to a first-look deal. A year later, Prime Video renewed Hazbin Hotel for a fifth and final season. Meanwhile, Helluva Boss Season 3 is scheduled to begin streaming there this fall.

SpindleHorse’s growth also complicates the very definition of “independent.” When Hazbin Hotel moved to Prime Video, some fans wondered whether it had surrendered its independence. Others argued that Medrano had gained another distributor for a world she still steers. That debate increasingly defines the new animation economy, and it resurfaces throughout the stories below.

3. Lackadaisy and the Audience as Financier

Lackadaisy followed a different road entirely. The project grew out of Tracy Butler’s Eisner-nominated webcomic about cats running a Prohibition-era speakeasy. Butler partnered with Spike Trotman of Iron Circus Comics to bring it to the screen. Their first Kickstarter, launched in 2020, sought $85,000 for a short film. It ultimately drew $330,256 from 5,957 backers. The team meant that pilot as a proof of concept, and it became a viral sensation in 2023.

Rather than wait for a network to act on that momentum, the creators went back to their readers. A 2023 BackerKit campaign set a modest goal of $125,000. Instead, it closed at $2,008,728 from 16,053 backers, enough to fund a five-episode season. Fans did more than applaud the pilot. They paid for the production that came after it, a role once reserved for studios and investors.

The story has since taken another turn. In October 2025, GLITCH partnered with Butler and director Fable Siegel to expand the first season. The new plan calls for six full-length, 22-minute episodes under the Glitch Presents banner. Crucially, the creators keep full creative control. Lackadaisy grew larger precisely because it proved its worth on its own terms first. In other words, independence can function as leverage rather than a limitation.

4. Monkey Wrench and the Reversed Negotiation

Monkey Wrench illustrates another inversion of the traditional model. New Zealand animator Joshua Palmer, known online as Zeurel, created it with his wife, Ashley Palmer. The sci-fi comedy follows a pair of cut-rate mercenaries drifting across the galaxy in search of paying work. The couple produced it through their own Awfraq Studios and funded it largely through Patreon. Episodes began arriving on YouTube and Newgrounds in 2022. By 2026, five episodes had aired, and the channel had grown to roughly 232,000 subscribers.

Then Netflix came calling. The streamer began carrying the first five episodes on August 19, 2026. Those versions feature remastered audio and multiple language dubs. According to the creators, Netflix had watched the series grow for some time before offering a licensing deal. The Palmers kept full rights and creative control. They have said most of the licensing money went toward finishing the sixth episode far sooner.

The order of those events carries real weight. Under the old model, creators approached distributors for permission and financing before a single episode existed. The Palmers, by contrast, made the show and found their viewers first. As a result, Netflix arrived to evaluate a proven product rather than a promise.

5. Worthikids and the Individual Creator as Studio

Not every independent success needs to become a conventional company, and Ian Worthington’s career proves the point. Working as Worthikids, he writes and animates Bigtop Burger largely by himself in Blender. The surreal comedy follows the crew of a clown-themed food truck. Its first episode, released in June 2020, drew more than a million views in its first months. Most of the episodes that followed reached similar numbers. His YouTube channel crossed one million subscribers in early 2024, and a third season began in 2025.

Worthikids matters here because his operation sits near the individual end of the spectrum. The boundaries separating the animator from the director and the distributor have started to dissolve. Today, a single talented person can occupy most of those roles at once. For young artists, that possibility changes the calculation about whether they need Hollywood at all.

6. Ramshackle and the Risk of Crowdfunding

Zi Chen, the Toronto animator known as Zeddyzi, followed a path that has become increasingly familiar. Chen first built an audience around Ramshackle, a comedy about three scrappy street rats. A thesis short and a webcomic introduced the characters. Next, Chen invited that audience to help turn the idea into a proper animated episode. The 2022 Kickstarter raised CA$86,287 from 706 backers against a CA$80,000 goal. Roughly 60 people worked on the finished pilot, which has since drawn about 9.5 million views.

The model carries no guarantees, however. Crowdfunding shifts financial risk away from a studio and onto the creators themselves. They must manage budgets and schedules while meeting the expectations of backers who feel a personal stake. Ramshackle cleared its goal by a slim margin, a reminder that not every campaign becomes a Lackadaisy. In exchange for that burden, creators gain something traditional development rarely offers. They keep genuine creative control over the finished work.

7. Godspeed and the Hollywood Veteran Who Walked Away

Newcomers are not the only people populating independent animation. Sometimes established creators step out of the traditional system on purpose, and Olan Rogers offers a telling example. Rogers created Final Space, which ran on TBS and Adult Swim. Its corporate owner later pulled the show from HBO Max entirely. Rather than pitch another network, he took Godspeed straight to fans in 2022. The Kickstarter collected $464,438 from 3,629 backers against an $80,000 goal.

Rogers co-founded Lightfold, a creator-led studio in Atlanta, to produce the project. The pilot premiered on YouTube in December 2023, and a second campaign launched alongside it. That effort raised $100,000 within seven hours and eventually reached about $300,000. Rogers has since joined GLITCH as a development executive on Lackadaisy. That move shows how tightly this community has knit itself together.

His path suggests a meaningful shift in how creators think about their careers. For years, independent animation served as a stepping stone toward a studio deal. For creators like Rogers, however, it has become an alternative to Hollywood rather than an audition.

8. DillonGoo Studios and the Professional Pipeline

Dillon Gu took yet another route. He served as a lead fight animator on Volume 3 of Rooster Teeth’s RWBY. Afterward, he channeled that experience into his own YouTube work under the name DillonGoo. In 2020, he founded DillonGoo Studios to push CG anime forward with new technology and original stories. His channel has since grown to about 1.4 million subscribers. Gu became a Blender Foundation partner in 2024 and has collaborated with Blizzard Entertainment and HoYoverse. In 2025, his team also launched its own web series, Soul Mart.

Gu’s example shows how professionals can carry skills from the studio system into operations they control. The industry often asks where the next great animation studio will come from. His story invites a better question. How many experienced animators have already started building one without announcing it?

9. Far-Fetched and the Value of Starting Small

Ashley Nichols and Dave Capdevielle created Far-Fetched, which represents an earlier stage of the independent pipeline. The horror comedy follows a band of misfit musicians whose music video shoot goes monstrously wrong. Both creators are veterans of the Hazbin Hotel pilot and Lackadaisy. They produced a two-minute proof of concept on their own before turning to crowdfunding. Spike Trotman of Iron Circus consulted on their 2025 Kickstarter. That campaign raised $178,352 from 2,505 backers against an $80,000 goal.

Projects like Far-Fetched matter precisely because they have not yet reached GLITCH-sized audiences. Independent animation is not a tidy collection of breakout hits. Beneath those famous titles lies a much larger layer of pilots and short films still competing for attention. Meanwhile, talent now circulates through the independent world the way it once moved across studio lots. Today’s two-minute proof of concept could easily become next year’s breakout series.

10. Alien Stage and a Global Audience

The rise of independent animation extends well past Hollywood and past the borders of the United States. The South Korean project Alien Stage, created by VIVINOS, blends animation, music, character design, and online fandom. It resists the categories television executives have relied on for decades. Between January and September 2025, videos carrying its name drew more than 330 million views. Remarkably, 90 percent of those views came from outside Korea. The finale alone drew 40 million views and trended in the United States, Mexico, France, and Japan.

That reach reveals something important about how the internet distributes stories. Language no longer walls off an audience the way it once did. According to YouTube, half of animation fans aged 14 to 49 watch series in languages other than their own. Consequently, an independent animator no longer needs to live near Burbank to reach the world. Such a creator does not even need to speak English.

What Does “Independent” Mean Anymore?

That question may be the most interesting one these projects raise. On the surface, the ten examples share surprisingly little. GLITCH looks nothing like Worthikids, and SpindleHorse operates on a different scale than Ramshackle. Lackadaisy moved from crowdfunding into a partnership with GLITCH. Monkey Wrench, meanwhile, streams on Netflix while continuing its independent life on YouTube.

Every one of them, however, emerged fully or partially outside the conventional television pipeline. That shared origin suggests that independent animation no longer means small animation. Instead, the term increasingly describes who initiates a project and who controls it. It also describes whether creators can reach an audience without first asking a gatekeeper for permission.

The Audience Came First

None of this means Hollywood is disappearing from the story. Netflix, Amazon, and other established companies remain enormously powerful distributors. Traditional studios still offer financing and production infrastructure that most independent creators cannot match. In fact, several projects above reached their largest audiences only after a streamer or theatrical partner joined in.

Something fundamental has changed nonetheless. Creators can now prove that an animated property works before Hollywood gets involved. In the most ambitious cases, they finance the pilot and build the studio before a single executive takes a meeting. When hundreds of millions of viewers choose animation born outside the system, the old question fades. The issue is no longer whether independent animation can compete with Hollywood. The more intriguing question is what happens once it no longer has to compete on Hollywood’s terms.