An animated skeleton, hand-drawn in a tiny regional town on Tasmania's southeast coast, has found millions of fans across the world. The character, known as Mr Skelly, is the work of artist Christian Watson, who uses him to share musings on life and death and to help others along the way. What began as a personal creative project has grown into something that reaches people far beyond the quiet corner of Australia where it is made.
The technique behind Mr Skelly is painstaking. Watson takes what looks like a normal family video and turns it into art, drawing the skeleton part by part over the top of the footage to capture realistic movement. The figure is then overlaid on backgrounds that he digitally hand-paints from photographs. The result is an animated character that moves naturally while sitting within carefully crafted scenes.
It is the words that accompany the images that seem to resonate most. In the captions, Watson shares his thoughts on themes such as grief, regret, love and gratitude. He says he had shared many of these messages before through other mediums but had never found a similar response until he delivered them through a skeleton. He laughs that he should always have known a skeleton would be accessible to everybody.
That accessibility has translated into a vast audience. Mr Skelly now has eight million social media followers, and the project has grown to the point where Watson employs a small team. The group breaks ideas down together in conversation, talking through how to communicate and reflecting on the world as a whole before the posts take shape.
Many of those who comment describe how the posts help them navigate their own challenges. Watson says that every day more people arrive because they feel a vulnerable connection with Mr Skelly. The character has become a way for the audience to engage with difficult emotions, with viewers returning for that sense of honesty and shared experience.
Watson grew up in the United States, a long way from his new home on the Tasman Peninsula. He says he is constantly inspired by the little vignettes he sees around him, from fields of flowers to mountain and water scenes. That landscape feeds directly into the hand-painted worlds in which Mr Skelly appears, grounding the global project in a very specific place.
Alongside his creative work, Watson has become a vocal critic of artificial intelligence in art, particularly the way some artists' work is being taken to train AI models. He says the practice leaves creators feeling as though they do not really own anything, which he describes as a very hard thing for an artist. Even so, his connection with his audience keeps him going, and he insists there is much to be hopeful for, calling life a beautiful gift despite all of its difficulties.