A stick figure (also known as a stick man, stick woman, or stick person) is a very simple drawing of a human or other animal, in which the limbs (arms and legs) and torso are represented using straight lines. The head is most often represented by a circle, which can be filled or unfilled. Details such as hands, feet, and a neck may be present or absent, and the head is sometimes embellished with details such as facial features or hair. Simpler stick figures often display disproportionate physical features and ambiguous emotion.[1]
The stick figure is a universally recognizable symbol—likely one of the most well-known in the world. Drawings of stick figures transcend language, location and demographic, and the stick figure's roots can be traced back to over 30,000 years ago. Stick figures are often drawn by children, and their simplicity and versatility have led to their use in infographics, signage, animations, storyboards, and many other kinds of visual media.
Following the advent of the World Wide Web, the stick figure saw prominent use in Flash animation.
The stick figure long predates modern civilisation. Stick figures were a feature of prehistoric art, and can be found in cave paintings and petroglyphs. Stick figure depictions of people, animals, and daily life have been discovered in numerous sites all over the world, such as depictions of Mimi in Australia or the Indalo in Spain.
As language began to develop, logographies (writing systems that use images, rather than letters, to represent words or morphemes) came to use stick figures as glyphs. In Mandaean manuscripts, uthras (celestial beings) were illustrated using stick figures.[2]
In 1925, Austrian sociologist Otto Neurath began work on what would become the International System of Typographic Picture Education (ISOTYPE), a system of conveying warnings, statistics, and general information through standardized and easily understandable pictographs. Neurath made significant use of stick figure designs to represent individuals and statistics. In 1934, graphic designer Rudolf Modley founded Pictorial Statistics Inc., and brought ISOTYPE to the United States in 1972.
The first international use of stick figures dates back to the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Pictograms created by Japanese designers Masaru Katsumi and Yoshiro Yamashita formed the basis of future pictograms.[3] [4] In 1972, Otto "Otl" Aicher designed round-ended, geometric, grid-based stick figures to be used in the signage, printed materials, and television broadcasts for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.[5] [6]
In 1974, the U.S. Department of Transportation commissioned the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) to develop the DOT pictograms, 34 (later 50) symbols for use at transportation hubs, public spaces, large events, and other contexts in which there may be great linguistic variation among those required to understand the signage. These pictograms featured stick figures heavily, drawing on previous designs, such as those made for the 1972 Summer Olympics. These symbols, or symbols derived from them, are widely used throughout the world today.
Tom Fulp began to produce 2D stick figure animations on his Amiga computer for entertainment purposes in the early 1990s. Fulp began to work with Flash, a piece of software used to produce interactive games and animations, soon after its acquisition by Macromedia. In 1995, he created the website Newgrounds, which he used to host games he had created, such as Pico's School (1999).[7] Prompted by the website's popularity, Fulp introduced a portal through which users could submit Flash animations and games of their own in 2000.[8] Other game and animation hosting sites, such as Addicting Games, followed soon after, and even older, more niche animation platforms such as stickdeath.com reached wider notoriety.
Stick Figure Death Theatre, often abbreviated as SFDT, was founded in 1996 by Matt Calvert, initially as a personal website. Animations of stick figures made up the majority of its content, and several animators such as Terkoiz and Edd Gould released their first animations there. The site shut down in 2013.[9]
Stick Page, formerly known as 'Stickmen', was founded in 1999 by Jason 'Crazy Jay' Whitham. The site eventually became a central forum for stick figure animators to upload animations and games. It merged with FluidAnims in 2012. In 2020, the Stick Page forum closed shortly after Adobe announced the discontinuation of Adobe Flash Player, on which the site relied—the website's main domain is still running.[10]
On April 19, 2001, Chinese animator Zhu Zhiqiang uploaded a 75-second-long video titled "Xiao Xiao" on the newly formed Newgrounds animation portal, inspired by over-the-top Hong Kong martial arts films.[11] Accompanied by bit-crushed audio samples, it shows two simple stick figures fighting with their fists and various weapons over a white background. As the fight gets increasingly intense, more tools including a bow and arrow, rocket launchers, and duplication abilities are introduced before the battle comes to a violent conclusion. "Xiao Xiao" quickly became the most popular Flash animation ever created. The animation spawned several imitations, and became the blueprint for a subgenre of 2D animation that has since garnered hundreds of millions of views.
On December 3, 2005, Adobe Systems Inc. acquired Macromedia, once again rebranding Macromedia's now ubiquitous Flash software. Almost a decade earlier, Adobe had turned down an offer to buy FutureSplash in favor of their own Acrobat system. Now, the tables had turned and the corporation was buying flash's new owner for US$3.4 billion.[14] With this acquisition, the program entered its final and most recognizable stage of development. Adobe spearheaded Flash animation for the next decade and a half, and it was during this period that Flash facilitated some of the most recognizable stick figure animations and games of all time.
See main article: articles and Animator vs. Animation. Created by animator, YouTuber, and artist Alan Becker, the first episode of Animator vs. Animation premiered on Newgrounds on June 3, 2006, using flash animation. It showed a stick figure fighting to break out of the animation program it was created in. The video has garnered almost 80 million views since its publication. As of December 2023, the series contains six main episodes and a number of spin-offs, among them include the video "Animation vs. Minecraft", which has gained over 305 million views as of March 2022. The sixth in the series of episodes features multiple styles of stick figures, including a cave painting character, a stickman similar to the one in Stickman vs. Wall, and a figure based on those in DOT pictograms. In total, all of Alan Becker's animation videos were watched over four and a half billion times with the vast majority of them being centered around stick figure animation.[15]
While Adobe Flash was the most popular stick figure animation tool, there were competitors, most notably Pivot Animator (formerly Pivot Stickfigure Animator). Created in 2005 by software developer Peter Bone, the program was specifically geared towards stick figure animation.[16] Unlike Adobe Flash, which had grown into a highly complex 2D animation environment, Pivot Animator, with its simplicity allowed virtually anyone to create stick figure animations without requiring any form of expertise. This brought the ability to create and distribute quality stick animations to a much greater audience than before, and alongside Flash, Pivot Animator soon became another central tool for the countless Internet users who were caught up in the trend.
Around 2012, popular stick figure animator Hyun created a brand new stick figure community after the shut down of FluidAnims. Hyun's Dojo is a primarily animation community, owned by the titular animator, which hosts collaborations, crossovers, and the popular Dojo duels wherein two animators create animated fights against one another for points known as "Rice".[17] The community consists of a website, an official Twitter, and a YouTube channel. Hyun's Dojo Community's first video was posted on December 30, 2012; followed by "Hyun's Dojo Promo" on March 9, 2013; "The Dojo Collab" on August 23, 2013; and finally, "Hyun's Dojo - Create Together" on August 24, 2013. Around 2015, Hyunsdojo.com was created, followed by a Discord server as a hub for animators and community members to collaborate and communicate with one another. In that time, the community was composed mostly of stick figure animators that popularized the art and animation form. However, the community has expanded past stick figures throughout the years. As of March 2021, the YouTube channel has reached over 2 million subscribers. The community posted a collaboration to celebrate the occasion. The channel slowly continues to grow in influence in the Internet stick figure community.
At some point between June 2008 and April 2009, an Internet copypasta began to appear featuring a Unicode stick figure named Bob. There was an initial surge in popularity in April 2009, leading to a hostile response from the YouTube community wherein the community would flag the copypasta as spam. This spread of the copypasta would reach its peak in search interest around June 2010 before declining gradually. However, on September 24, 2013, YouTube announced that they would be integrating the YouTube Comments section with Google+.[18] In response, the YouTube community brought back the Bob copypasta in a new form, with Bob "building an army" against Google+.[19] This resulted in the biggest spike in popularity for the copypasta, reaching its peak popularity in November 2013.
In July 2017, Adobe Systems, which had continued to support and develop both Flash Animator and Flash Player for the past 12 years, announced that they would officially end support for the program by the end of the decade.[24] This decision had far-reaching consequences as it entailed not only the end of development on the software but also the official end of sites that still supported Flash and the deactivation of virtually every instance of Flash player via a built-in kill switch.[25] A number of safety issues and more versatile alternatives like HTML5 had rendered Flash obsolete.[26] Flash advocates and fans called for preservation efforts to ensure not all games, animations and other types of Flash media would be lost forever.
Following Adobe's announcement of their intention to retire Flash, online communities began efforts to preserve the genre's history. In January 2018, a YouTuber named Ben Latimore, going by the online handle BlueMaxima, created Flashpoint Archive, an open-source project aiming to preserve the functionality of many Flash animations and games.[27] It became a large library—"Xiao Xiao", the Shock series, wpnFire, Storm the House, and countless other stick figure games and animations were saved and archived over the coming months and years.
Despite the impending discontinuation of Flash, its final years saw the release of some of the most popular and most polished stick figure animations and games of all time. Notable examples include the Henry Stickmin series (August 7, 2020) and the half-hour long "Animator vs. Animation V" (December 5, 2020). Finally, on January 12, 2021, all instances of Flash Player ceased operation and Adobe Flash was officially retired.[28] Due to the conservation efforts of Flashpoint Archive, and because of big hosting platforms like Newgrounds and Kongregate developing their own workarounds, the Flash community, and, with it, the stick figure animation subgenre, were preserved from extinction. Creators from that point onward found alternatives for the now defunct software, such as Pivot and Flash's official successor, Adobe Animate.
On March 13, 2022, animator Sopple, along with Hyun's Dojo Community, created a timeline of the history of stick figure animations online.[29]
As of Unicode version 13.0, there are five stick figure characters in the Symbols for Legacy Computing block. These are in the codepoints U+1FBC5 to U+1FBC9.[30]
OpenMoji supports the five characters along with joining character sequences to give the other figures a dress.[31] For example, the sequence,, ().
| U+1FBC5 | STICK FIGURE | Not to be mistaken with | ||
| U+1FBC6 | STICK FIGURE WITH ARMS RAISED | |||
| U+1FBC7 | STICK FIGURE LEANING LEFT | Mirror images of each other. | ||
| U+1FBC8 | STICK FIGURE LEANING RIGHT | |||
| U+1FBC9 | STICK FIGURE WITH DRESS | Not to be mistaken with |