TAYLOR JOHNSON: I have to wear many hats at Adult Swim, working on everything from the show campaigns to making packages [the logos that air between commercial breaks]. I’ve always been interested in art, as long as I can remember. My parents put me into art classes in, like, garages—whatever they could get their hands on. My mom paints in her free time, so I’ve always kind of been drawn to it. My friend Isaiah Toothtaker asked me to do a video for him, so I took a stab at it. Earl Sweatshirt saw that video, hit up Isaiah, and we got connected. We wanted to do this Ralph Bakshi homage video. That’s how I got my feet in the door.

For “Off Top,” I just drew a bunch of Earls for a week. I really pushed it, like, “I really want this to look as close to [Bakshi’s] era as possible.” That’s my favorite kind of animation in general—the ’70s and ’80s stuff. It just looks real great and authentic to me. I start off with hand-drawn sketches, then I’ll do frame-by-frame animation, so [the frames] wouldn’t be perfect, and you could see the mistakes in it. When I sent the reference frames to Alex Barrella, who was helping me animate, he kept the wonky lines. I’ve always liked loose art, like readymade sculptures or mistake pieces. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s fun to do it that way—it’s a little more loose and free.