About

The Anime Filter is a Snapchat filter that morphs a user's face into an anime-style drawing. The filter quickly went viral the day it released, trending across multiple social media platforms.

Origin

One of the most popular prior instances of an anime-style filter went viral in April of 2020. The Selfie 2 Waifu application takes a selfie and converts it into an anime-style drawing. The Snapchat filter differs, as it offers a live animated filter that matches your facial expressions as they happen rather than a still photograph.

On September 22nd, Snapchat released their anime filter to the public. That same day, #animefilter started trending on Twitter and TikTok, with over 41.5 million views under the hashtag on TikTok in the first day of its release. One of the most popular uploads on TikTok came from TikToker judah,^[1] whose video garnered over 2.7 million views in 23 hours (shown below).

Spread

TikTokers and Twitter users continued to share their anime filter results under the hashtag throughout the day. Some users apply the filter to their pets, characters (both animated and not,) celebrity photographs, and memes for comedic effect. An example of this can be seen on KingIndigo20's^[2] Twitter page, where they uploaded an anime filtered version of Chef Boyardee (shown below).

On September 22nd, 2020, Distractify published an article about the anime filter's popularity on TikTok.^[3] That same day, Newsweek published a tutorial on how to access the filter,^[4] and Vice published a feature on it.^[5]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References