Teaching yourself to animate is the kind of project most people imagine doing someday. At 45, Azize Erim did it, giving herself the tools to bring her characters and their inner worlds to life.
Tales of a Black Sheep is an animated project centered on a hand-drawn character Erim calls Black Sheep. According to Erim, the character grew from a lifelong experience of feeling different and questioning systems that never completely made sense. Creating Black Sheep, she says, was a way of examining that experience rather than moving past it.
The route to animation ran through several other disciplines first. Erim was born in London and raised in Adana, a city in southern Turkey. After high school she moved to Istanbul to study sociology. Her original goal was documentary filmmaking; she worked as an unpaid assistant director on a documentary project before the funding ran out. While completing her degree she also co-founded the university’s theater and arts club. The combination would surface in everything that came afterward. The sociology training gave her a way of thinking about how people get sorted and positioned by the structures around them, and the theater gave her a place to take those observations.
She spent her early career in Istanbul working across creative fields, managing a rock band at 22 and co-producing and hosting a cooking show, before leaving for Los Angeles in 2014, at 35. In Los Angeles, she began rebuilding her creative life through acting, writing, improv, and eventually stand-up. She trained at Playhouse West and later at the Margie Haber Studio, where she also taught acting to children. She completed UCB’s writing program and studied improv there as well. Her short film “Conscience” was presented at the Cannes Film Festival’s Short Film Corner in 2015. Her acting credits include a role in the TruTV comedy series “I’m Sorry” and an appearance in HBO’s documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.” In 2016, she and creative collaborator Xenia LeBlanc co-founded Broken English, a sketch comedy YouTube channel whose videos were featured by WhoHaha and Funny or Die. A 2021 profile in ShoutoutLA traced that stretch of her career.
Each phase left its mark on the artist and storyteller she was becoming. The performance work sharpened her sense of what an audience notices. The sociology training kept threading back in, pushing her toward questions about which people are expected to belong in any given context and which ones are handed the ongoing work of managing the gap themselves.
The shift came when Erim taught herself 2D animation at 45. One of her first major animated projects was “To the Moon,” a music video she created and produced for Pet Pop, a family-friendly music project she developed with music producer Okan Isik. Inspired by her black cat, Moon, the video follows a cat who travels to the moon to prove how much she is loved, per Erim. Creating and producing that animated world, she says, gave her the practical foundation to begin bringing Black Sheep to life.
The character exists at the intersection of several themes Erim describes as central to the project: neurodivergence and what it costs a person to mask it daily, the slow work of confronting patterns carried down through generations, perimenopause and a stage of life that almost never surfaces in animated storytelling, immigrant identity and the unwritten codes a person must decode when they arrive somewhere new, and the ordinary absurdities of how contemporary life is structured.
Black Sheep, as Erim describes her, is typically found in her armchair with a bubble pipe, watching the world with the close, unhurried attention of someone who has spent too long studying it to stop now. The humor she draws from what she sees is observational: the absurdity, Erim says, is already present in reality. She approaches the work with the conviction that meaningful connection matters more than content built for an algorithm. Erim writes, edits, illustrates, and animates Tales of a Black Sheep independently.
The longer-term goal, as Erim describes it, is to push Tales of a Black Sheep into animated shorts, visual essays, and extended storytelling formats, giving the character the room to develop that a social media feed cannot.
