Illymation Bio

While attending college in California, Illymation was introduced to YouTube animator Alex Clark by Chris Tanimayto and she started interning for Alex Clark. During this period, she learned to do story-time animations on YouTube. She soon started uploading on her own YouTube channel, illymation. Her first video, UnAmerican Airlines Cancelled My Trip, was posted on January 15, 2018. In her second video on January 19, 2018, she properly introduced herself and her channel, and also outlined her goals for YouTube.

Illymation continued to upload more story-time videos such as Cussed Out by a Stranger (ft. Rebaka-Chan), Harassed at Chick-fil-A (Work Stories) and My Video Game Boyfriend. By this time she had gained recognition after participating in an MEP with other animators and had crossed 100K subscribers. However, it was her three-part series about her past abusive relationship that became very popular and contributed to her quick rise on the platform. The first part of the series, How I Met My Abusive (ex) Boyfriend, posted on September 7, 2018, crossed 12 million views within the year and her channel reached the 1 million subscriber milestone by January 2019.

Illymation was born as Ilyssa “Illy” Levy on September 15, 1997 in North Carolina, United States. She has a brother named Graham who sometimes made music for her videos. She attended Franklinton High School. While she was supposed to go to East Carolina University in her home state, she was coerced into moving to California for higher education by her controlling boyfriend and enrolled into an animation course at Laguna College of Art and Design. During her teenage years, she worked for Chick-fil-A and an ice cream shop. She was diagnosed with autism in May 2022. She has two pet cats, Luigi and Juniper.

Illymation was only 13 when she began a relationship with a 17-year-old boy named Haris after meeting him on a now-defunct collaborative drawing website called ‘ArtSpots’. He was attention-hungry and abusive who would often get angry at her if she spent time on anything or anyone other than him and even pressured her to send explicit pictures of her underage body. He further threatened to commit suicide if she tried to end the relationship. She met him face-to-face for the first time after she moved to California for college, and her experience on their first proper date was not pleasant either. As she started college and made new friends, she told him she wanted a break. However, when that didn’t go well, she finally decided to end the relationship, even though her attempt to get a restraining order on him failed.

During her early days of interaction with Haris, one of his schoolmates named Holly, who was harassed by him before, had contacted her to warn her about him. Later, after she uploaded the first video in her “abusive boyfriend” series, Holly contacted her again and they were able to meet up and discuss their experiences, which was documented in the third video of the series. While she mentioned that it is hard for her to fall in love again and trust people due to the traumatic experience, shortly after ending her relationship with Haris, she started dating a guy named Calvin who respected her boundaries. However, they broke up later because they were “better off as friends”, and they continue to be friends. A few months later, she became friends with fellow animator Chris Tanimayto, who was interning for Alex Clark, and they started dating “after some awkward nights”. She dedicated the love song ‘Zodiac Signs’ to him, but they later broke up. She also opened up about previously dealing with self-harm in the music video Beautiful? She has described herself as “either bi or pan” and later revealed her gender to be demigirl with she/they pronouns.