“An outlet for the weird part of my brain”: Dale Crosby Close’s daily animations are hilarious hallucinations

Born and raised up north in Harrogate, illustrator and animator Dale Crosby Close is currently based in “a small town between Sheffeild and Leeds called Penistone”, he tells us, “famous for its sheep and its penis based name.”

With buckets of humour, the illustrator has amassed a huge range of daily animations on YouTube and TikTok, the base of which is always a rather tangential play on everyday scenarios or exchanges, like ordering a sausage roll at Greggs or boarding a Ryan Air flight. “I enjoy writing scripts and imagining what people might say to each other in any given situation, it’s one of my favourite things to do,” the illustrator says. Dale’s “arguably questionable” narratives or drawings, as he calls them, often draw from the collection of notes he keeps in his sketchbooks or on his phone of things that “catch my eye or my ear or my mouth or nose day to day” he says. “I just jot it all down and see what happens.”

The hope being, that later down the line, any of these rather unserious observations could lead to something that might make people laugh. “Life can be a pretty rough raisin,” he says, “so if I manage to distract someone from whatever they’re going through or brighten up their day or remind them that it’s okay to do what you like doing and have fun, even for a moment, then my job is done.” Simple affirmations or everyday truisms, these kinds of silly illustrations and humorous animated narratives are “an outlet for some weird part within my brain”, he tells us, “I have the freedom to say and do more than regular life allows.”

Formerly an editorial illustrator for publications like The New York Times and Politico, Dale pivoted to animation when he realised that purely working on things that were static (and often far more serious), wasn’t always the perfect fit for him. A lot of the things that inspire his illustration work now stem from familiar childhood references such as classic TV like The Simpsons and Futuruma, video games and 90s songs. So we weren’t overly surprised to hear that one of the biggest creative influences for the animations that Dale makes today is none other than the creator of Salad Fingers, David Frith. “He was just making for the fun of it, something I knew one day I wanted to be doing, it just took me 20 years to get there,” Dale ends.