SUGZ
Bigger stupid things
Ali Tuna Irman is twenty-three, Turkish, based in London, and spends most of his time making a character do things before he's had the chance to overthink them. Sugz started as a way to get back to a feeling Ali says he had as a kid, not caring whether something made sense, not checking an idea against any rule before running with it. "You have an idea, you like it, you do it," he says, and that sentence is close to the entire method behind the work.
The character showed up during a period Ali describes plainly as him trying to figure himself out, something he admits he's still doing. Two things landed around the same time and reshaped how he worked. He watched Masaaki Yuasa's anime Kaiba and felt its visual language sink directly into his own hand, a debt he says is obvious if you look at the two side by side. Then he came across a line attributed to Martin Scorsese, "the most personal is the most creative," and something in it clicked. He started asking himself what he actually found funny, what he'd loved as a kid, which ideas arrived in his head before he'd learned to filter them out. The more he trusted those instincts instead of second-guessing them, the more the work started to feel unmistakably like him. "Sugz is basically a part of me," he says. "He's almost like an alter ego for the more playful side of me. And he has cooler hair."
Visibility was never the engine behind any of it. Ali kept making Sugz because making things was fun and he wanted to put that fun somewhere other people could find it, and the strange result was that the less he tried to engineer something cool, the more people responded to it anyway. The proof that actually mattered to him didn't come from a follower count. It came from his three year old nephew, who started copying Sugz's behaviour and calling the character by Ali's own name without anyone prompting him to. "He just sees me in the character," Ali says. "That means a lot more to me than numbers or visibility."
Life drawing taught him to forget what an object was called and look instead at shape, line, space, and colour, a shift that made the whole world feel more abstract and changed how he approached making anything. Moving to London did similar work from a different angle, surrounding him with people whose taste and references reshaped his own in ways he wouldn't have found alone. Among the artists he keeps returning to, Shinichirō Watanabe, Robert Valley, and Masaaki Yuasa each pull him in a different direction, Valley's technical precision, Watanabe's tendency to romanticise everything he touches, Yuasa's loose, natural freedom. Ali's own work sits somewhere pulling from all three at once.
He doesn't think being distinct requires inventing something nobody's attempted before. What makes Sugz his is simpler and harder to copy: it came from what he's actually lived through, filtered through nobody else's eye but his own. "Nobody else can really be me," he says. "In the same way, I could never make someone else's work the way they do."
The character is already stepping off the screen. A Crazy Hair Day event with GrownKid in New York, free mohawks handed out to strangers, came together because Ali recognised the same reckless playfulness in their energy that drives his own work. His first Sugz art toys are due toward the end of 2026, with limited merch, lamps, larger sculptures, and even a 3D zoetrope already on his mind for after that, alongside a growing list of collaborations and a first solo exhibition in London he's beginning to plan, with more cities hopefully following it. None of that ambition is meant to make the work more serious. If anything, he wants the opposite, the same stupid, playful energy scaled up rather than smoothed out. "I want to make bigger stupid things," he says, and he says it more than once, treating it as an actual mission statement rather than a joke.
Screens across Shibuya, brand collaborations, places he never expected the character to end up, watching Sugz reach that kind of scale has come with a tension Ali is still working through. Recognition, he's noticed, has a way of quietly turning into responsibility, and responsibility has a way of turning into seriousness, which is exactly the thing Sugz was built to escape in the first place. "I want to take what I'm doing seriously," he says, "without making the work itself serious." He treats every new sign of scale as a reminder to stay humble rather than a reason to stop questioning his own work, since there's always someone else out there making something that resets his sense of what's possible.
The actual daily process behind all of it is almost aggressively unglamorous. Wake up, come up with an idea, make an animation, post it, go to sleep, repeat. He works first thing in the morning because the creative pressure needs somewhere to go before the rest of his day can start, and skipping it leaves him, in his own words, a little grumpy. People frequently assume Sugz is a girl, and Ali doesn't correct it or seem bothered by the guesswork people make about him personally either. Once something is out in the world, he figures, it stops belonging only to him. Anyone encountering Sugz gets to decide what they see in him.
Where it all goes next, Ali measures against artists working in completely different mediums rather than other animators specifically, refusing to treat what he does as smaller than music, film, or fashion just because the format is different. The size of the ambition hasn't changed the actual instruction he's following, keep the kid inside him happy, and let that be the thing pulling everything else forward. Bigger brands, bigger projects, bigger stupid things, in that order, and he means all three exactly as literally as they sound.
Visibility was never the engine behind any of it. Ali kept making Sugz because making things was fun and he wanted to put that fun somewhere other people could find it, and the strange result was that the less he tried to engineer something cool, the more people responded to it anyway. The proof that actually mattered to him didn't come from a follower count. It came from his three year old nephew, who started copying Sugz's behaviour and calling the character by Ali's own name without anyone prompting him to. "He just sees me in the character," Ali says. "That means a lot more to me than numbers or visibility."
Life drawing taught him to forget what an object was called and look instead at shape, line, space, and colour, a shift that made the whole world feel more abstract and changed how he approached making anything. Moving to London did similar work from a different angle, surrounding him with people whose taste and references reshaped his own in ways he wouldn't have found alone. Among the artists he keeps returning to, Shinichirō Watanabe, Robert Valley, and Masaaki Yuasa each pull him in a different direction, Valley's technical precision, Watanabe's tendency to romanticise everything he touches, Yuasa's loose, natural freedom. Ali's own work sits somewhere pulling from all three at once.
He doesn't think being distinct requires inventing something nobody's attempted before. What makes Sugz his is simpler and harder to copy: it came from what he's actually lived through, filtered through nobody else's eye but his own. "Nobody else can really be me," he says. "In the same way, I could never make someone else's work the way they do."
The character is already stepping off the screen. A Crazy Hair Day event with GrownKid in New York, free mohawks handed out to strangers, came together because Ali recognised the same reckless playfulness in their energy that drives his own work. His first Sugz art toys are due toward the end of 2026, with limited merch, lamps, larger sculptures, and even a 3D zoetrope already on his mind for after that, alongside a growing list of collaborations and a first solo exhibition in London he's beginning to plan, with more cities hopefully following it. None of that ambition is meant to make the work more serious. If anything, he wants the opposite, the same stupid, playful energy scaled up rather than smoothed out. "I want to make bigger stupid things," he says, and he says it more than once, treating it as an actual mission statement rather than a joke.
Screens across Shibuya, brand collaborations, places he never expected the character to end up, watching Sugz reach that kind of scale has come with a tension Ali is still working through. Recognition, he's noticed, has a way of quietly turning into responsibility, and responsibility has a way of turning into seriousness, which is exactly the thing Sugz was built to escape in the first place. "I want to take what I'm doing seriously," he says, "without making the work itself serious." He treats every new sign of scale as a reminder to stay humble rather than a reason to stop questioning his own work, since there's always someone else out there making something that resets his sense of what's possible.
The actual daily process behind all of it is almost aggressively unglamorous. Wake up, come up with an idea, make an animation, post it, go to sleep, repeat. He works first thing in the morning because the creative pressure needs somewhere to go before the rest of his day can start, and skipping it leaves him, in his own words, a little grumpy. People frequently assume Sugz is a girl, and Ali doesn't correct it or seem bothered by the guesswork people make about him personally either. Once something is out in the world, he figures, it stops belonging only to him. Anyone encountering Sugz gets to decide what they see in him.
Where it all goes next, Ali measures against artists working in completely different mediums rather than other animators specifically, refusing to treat what he does as smaller than music, film, or fashion just because the format is different. The size of the ambition hasn't changed the actual instruction he's following, keep the kid inside him happy, and let that be the thing pulling everything else forward. Bigger brands, bigger projects, bigger stupid things, in that order, and he means all three exactly as literally as they sound.
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