Blue and orange timeline title card for a post on when Italian brainrot started

Published August 17, 2026 · The Rotino Team · fact-checked against the sources below

Every explainer answers “when did Italian brainrot start” with two useless words: on TikTok. That tells you nothing. The trend has an actual chronology, with real months and a real mechanism that made it spread, and once you lay it out on a timeline it stops feeling like chaos and starts making sense. This post is that timeline, dated and sourced, with the invented numbers left out.

When did Italian brainrot start? The trend is usually traced to early 2025, when an AI-generated shark in sneakers called tralalero tralala began circulating on TikTok in January 2025. It grew through a wave of similar characters across February and March 2025, went mainstream by mid-2025 with coverage in outlets like The Guardian in June 2025, and ran on one engine throughout: AI-generated images plus reusable audio anyone could remix.

Early 2025: the shark that set the template

The usual starting point is tralalero tralala, a three-legged AI shark wearing sneakers, narrated by an Italian text-to-speech voice. Know Your Meme and Wikipedia both place its rise in January 2025, and it is the character nearly every history names first. It matters less as “the first funny AI animal” and more as the template: a real animal, a wrong detail, an incongruous human object, a nonsense Italian-sounding name, and a synthetic voiceover telling absurd lore over the image. Our Tralalero Tralala explainer has the messy full origin, including a version of the phrase that predates the shark by over a year.

The exact origin of the genre is genuinely unclear, and Wikipedia says so plainly, so it is fair to treat tralalero tralala as the widely accepted starting marker rather than a proven single source. That distinction matters for a trend built on anonymous AI uploads, where the first example is almost impossible to pin down.

February to March 2025: the cast fills out

Once the template existed, the characters came fast. Brr brr patapim, the forest-and-baboon creature, was posted around 17 February 2025 per Know Your Meme. Chimpanzini bananini, the monkey-in-a-banana, followed on 13 March 2025. Across those two months the genre went from one breakout character to a whole roster of AI hybrids, each with the same recipe and a fresh silly name.

This is the stretch where “Italian brainrot” stopped being a single meme and became a format that anyone could add to. If you want the running cast list with who arrived when, our Italian brainrot characters roster tracks it.

The mechanism: AI images plus reusable audio

The single most important thing to understand about the timeline is why it spread at all, because that is what separates Italian brainrot from a normal viral clip. Two ingredients did the work.

First, AI image generation made new characters nearly free to produce. Anyone could prompt a “shark wearing sneakers” or a “monkey banana” and get a usable, uncanny image in seconds, so the supply of new characters was effectively unlimited. Second, the audio travelled on its own. Each character’s voiceover is a reusable sound, so thousands of people could drop the same audio over their own edits without ever seeing the original. The image is almost a costume the sound wears. Our what is Italian brainrot explainer breaks that engine down in more detail.

Put those together and you get a self-fuelling machine: cheap to make a character, trivial to reuse a sound, and a “ranking the brainrot characters” video format that stitches the whole cast into new content daily. That is why the trend scaled far faster than any one video could.

Mid-2025: the mainstream crossover

By the middle of 2025 the trend had outgrown TikTok’s for-you page. On 25 June 2025 The Guardian published a piece on how gen alpha went wild for these AI brain rot animals, naming chimpanzini bananini and ballerina cappuccina in the headline. That is a solid marker for the mainstream moment, when parents, teachers, and general-audience press started paying attention rather than just kids and meme accounts.

I am date-stamping that on purpose. Trend-watch claims age quickly, and “it is huge right now” is worthless without a month attached. As of August 2026, the cast keeps rotating and new characters keep appearing, but the June 2025 Guardian coverage remains a clean, citable point where the genre crossed into the mainstream.

The Indonesian parallel: Tung Tung Tung Sahur

Here is the part flat timelines miss. Italian brainrot did not grow in a vacuum, it ran alongside a parallel Indonesian trend often called “Anomali AI,” and the two cross-pollinated. The best-known crossover character is Tung Tung Tung Sahur, a wooden creature whose name comes from the onomatopoeia of Indonesians beating a kentongan slit drum to wake people for sahur, the pre-dawn meal during Ramadan, as Know Your Meme documents.

That character got absorbed into the Italian brainrot cast even though its roots are Indonesian rather than Italian, which tells you the trend was never really about Italy. It was about a format, absurd AI creature plus chantable audio, that any language could plug into. That crossover success is also exactly why Tung Tung Tung Sahur ended up at the centre of a real legal fight over who owns Italian brainrot, which we cover separately.

So when did Italian brainrot start, really

Line it up and the shape is clear. Early 2025: a template character. February to March 2025: the cast fills out on cheap AI images and reusable audio. Mid-2025: mainstream press notices. Throughout: a parallel Indonesian wave feeding the same format. That is a real answer to when Italian brainrot started, not “on TikTok,” and it is honest about the fuzzy parts, because the exact first spark is genuinely undocumented.

The best way to feel how the format works is to run it yourself. Type any two ideas, like drum and cat, into Rotino and it will merge them into one Italian brainrot cartoon with its own silly name you can save and share.

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