About

"Pixel Pig" is an electronic song by Di Young released in February 2020. The song gained virality in amateur animations over the course of 2020 and 2021, inspiring a series of animations known as "XD animations," often depicting anime and Gacha characters dancing to it. The song also became popularized on TikTok in late 2021 as the subject of lip dubs.

Origin

On February 22nd, 2020, musician Di Young released the electronic song "Pixel Pix" across platforms, including YouTube^[1] and SoundCloud,^[2] gaining over 7.6 million views on the former and 485,000 plays on the latter in just under two years (shown below).

Spread

On August 24th, 2020, YouTuber^[3] ZZEFF posted an original animation featuring anime characters dancing to the song, gaining over 1.3 million views in just over a year. This inspired similar animations over the following year, known as "XD animations" or "XD memes" for the "XD" expression used on the characters throughout. On October 15th, YouTuber Pudding Bahagia posted a similar animation using Gacha characters, gaining over 5 million views in roughly a year (shown below).

On January 30th, 2021, YouTuber UnknownSpy posted an animation featuring a character dancing to the song, gaining over 8.2 million views in a year (shown below, left). On February 2nd, YouTuber shortcxke posted the same type of animation, gaining over 2.8 million views in a similar span of time (shown below, right).

TikTok

In December 2021 the song saw a boost in usage with lip-dub videos on TikTok, particularly in Russia. The original sound for the song has been used over 168,000 times as of January 2022 (examples shown below, left and right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References