WAVES will outlive whatever else you watch this week.

Jason Raymond, the animator who draws light into darkness, won't let you forget who you are.

Before Jason Raymond could talk his way into a friendship, he had to draw his way in. Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, as a first-gen Ghanaian-American kid with more paper than spending money and more imagination than either, he figured out early that a portrait was a better opening line than anything he could actually say. When he met his best friend of ten years for the first time, he drew her and her crush holding each other before they had actually spoken a word to each other. Bold, yes, but also: it worked. “People love seeing themselves in new ways,” he says, as if this were obvious, as if most of us don’t spend our whole lives waiting for someone to offer exactly that.

He was the kid who drew on everything, paper, cardboard, whatever was in reach, casting his siblings as superheroes in worlds that only existed on the page. His parents, true to form, wanted a doctor, a scientist, or something with a title. “After years of convincing them I didn’t want to be a doctor or a scientist, I feel like they softened up once they saw how hard I was working to make it happen.” He was going to be an animator whether the house approved or not. The friends who were there to support the early work are a big part of why he kept going. “I am so grateful to the friends who loved my drawing, even when I didn’t know what I was doing,” he says. “That is the magic of art. There is something to be found in every stage.”

Jason Raymond, a young Black man in a denim jacket and black tee, resting his chin on his hand and smiling softly at the camera

The real turning point was Tumblr in the fifth grade. He stumbled across the Steven Universe crew posting unfiltered, behind-the-scenes footage of the show. He’d already been obsessed with the portal energy of Code Lyoko, a group of kids traveling to a virtual world to discover their purpose, but the Tumblr discovery was different. It told him the portals were made by hand, by a team of people. “I knew I wanted to be in that room,” he says. “Where drawings came alive.”

By high school, the work had become considerably heavier. He painted a self-portrait called “Headlines,” depicting himself surrounded by the names of Black men and women killed by police. “There was something beautiful in that tragedy,” he says now. “It awakened the part of me looking for light in darkness.” The world had a habit, he’d noticed, of selling the idea that Black history was a thing of the past—done, documented, and archived, but his work has never entertained that. “Black Futures Matter,” he says. “Forever and always.”

Animated protest scene from WAVES with raised fists and yellow signs reading "No Justice No Peace," "Say Their Names," and "BLM"
Courtesy of Jason Raymond

In his recent animated short Waves, a young Black boy stands in the ocean and tries to scrub gold off his skin, but it won’t come off. His father watches from the shore, and instead of helping him wash it away, he challenges his son to look at it differently. What follows is a montage of Black cultural memory so tender it catches you somewhere between the throat and the chest. The film has one thing to say, and it says it cleanly: don’t try to wash yourself away. Find your flow.

It started in an Animation Narrative class at Pratt, where his professor, Shayla Lawz, gave one instruction: choose an object with a story. Jason chose a gold pan, because his parents are from the Gold Coast, and something in the image of sifting through sand in search of value was already deeply personal to him. Then Lawz screened the music video for Kamasi Washington’s “Truth” which features a boy washing his face as time and community unfold around him with the years collapsing like a wave, and the two images clicked. He thought of a Black boy trying to wash magic off his skin, and he had a film. “Loving the parts of yourself you can’t erase is something I practice every day,” he says. “Waves is the piece I found along the journey.”

The emotional core is the father-son reunion on the shore. Jason’s father, by his own account, is not gentle. He’s the tough-love type, love that teaches without always knowing how to soften, but what Jason wanted to make was the other kind. “I knew I had a desire in me for a love that is gentle, that is kind, that is understanding,” he says. “I wanted to create a world where Black love could be like water—strong, powerful, crushing, still, calm, and soothing.” He built it out of the tenderness he’d received from mentors, coaches, and friends over the years, taking what they poured into him and putting it on screen. He shared with us that holding both things at once, the boy’s vulnerability and his sense of isolation, without letting either tip the other over was the real challenge. “Creating that emptiness was a really hard balance,” he reveals. The scene that dazzles most, though, is the one connecting the protagonist to all of his ancestors through the gold on his skin. “I wanted the audience to feel surrounded by community. Embraced by a golden love. I wanted it to reach the parts of ourselves we forget.”

Still from WAVES showing an animated father holding his young son close, the boy's skin glowing gold, both standing in still water at dusk
Courtesy of Jason Raymond

In 2021, he visited Ghana and met family he’d only ever known as names overheard from a living room couch, and meeting them in person reshuffled something essential about his sense of home, about how big a story he was already a part of. “The ocean between the States and Ghana is not just distance,” he reflects. “It’s a story deeper than I ever imagined.”

Telling that story through magical realism came from conviction, not aesthetics. “I think magical realism is the perfect genre for Black stories,” he says. “We have endured so much suffering as a people and found joy. We created art, music, films, families, and to do that when the world is against you is nothing short of a superpower.” 

Animated barbershop scene from WAVES with a barber cutting a young child's hair while family members watch from nearby seats
Courtesy of Jason Raymond

His creative process is controlled chaos, and he means it as a compliment to both words. Inspiration is not something he waits on, instead he feeds it from every direction: conversations overheard on the train, a farmer’s market, or a magic chicken. You’ll have to ask him about the last one. “The work is stringing those ideas together,” he says, meaning the alchemy of it, the part where three unrelated things become one story. Deep in a project, his wall becomes a command center of post-it notes, his sketchbooks fill with webs of connected thoughts, and everything gets torn out and cut up and rearranged until something sticks, but when the stress piles too high, he goes back to the shows that made him fall in love with animation in the first place—Steven Universe, Code Lyoko, Moomin. When even that isn’t enough, he hits the volleyball court. “The ideas flow easier after I’ve been moving,” he says.

Beyoncé is somewhere in the curriculum too. “The way she shoots her visuals really helped me understand how I want to portray Blackness in my work,” he explains. To him, it’s a masterclass in celebrating Black beauty and strength, and he has been studying it accordingly.

Animating on paper is still on the list. The industry, he says with a quiet confidence that borders on a warning, is not ready. In the meantime, the one thing he wishes someone had told him earlier: there will always be someone eager to tell you your idea isn’t worth making, isn’t interesting or won’t amount to anything. “If you love it,” he says, “there is always something worthwhile.”

That’s also the sentence he’d send back to the Columbus kid who drew his way into rooms and painted headlines and spent his whole childhood making space for people on paper. Or maybe it’s the simpler one. The one that’s the thesis of everything he makes, and everything he still has left to make. “You are already everything you need to be.”

Written by: HQ

Before Jason Raymond could talk his way into a friendship, he had to draw his way in. Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, as a first-gen Ghanaian-American kid with more paper than spending money and more imagination than either, he figured out early that a portrait was a better opening line than anything he could actually say. When he met his best friend of ten years for the first time, he drew her and her crush holding each other before they had actually spoken a word to each other. Bold, yes, but also: it worked. “People love seeing themselves in new ways,” he says, as if this were obvious, as if most of us don’t spend our whole lives waiting for someone to offer exactly that.

He was the kid who drew on everything, paper, cardboard, whatever was in reach, casting his siblings as superheroes in worlds that only existed on the page. His parents, true to form, wanted a doctor, a scientist, or something with a title. “After years of convincing them I didn’t want to be a doctor or a scientist, I feel like they softened up once they saw how hard I was working to make it happen.” He was going to be an animator whether the house approved or not. The friends who were there to support the early work are a big part of why he kept going. “I am so grateful to the friends who loved my drawing, even when I didn’t know what I was doing,” he says. “That is the magic of art. There is something to be found in every stage.”

Jason Raymond, a young Black man in a denim jacket and black tee, resting his chin on his hand and smiling softly at the camera

The real turning point was Tumblr in the fifth grade. He stumbled across the Steven Universe crew posting unfiltered, behind-the-scenes footage of the show. He’d already been obsessed with the portal energy of Code Lyoko, a group of kids traveling to a virtual world to discover their purpose, but the Tumblr discovery was different. It told him the portals were made by hand, by a team of people. “I knew I wanted to be in that room,” he says. “Where drawings came alive.”

By high school, the work had become considerably heavier. He painted a self-portrait called “Headlines,” depicting himself surrounded by the names of Black men and women killed by police. “There was something beautiful in that tragedy,” he says now. “It awakened the part of me looking for light in darkness.” The world had a habit, he’d noticed, of selling the idea that Black history was a thing of the past—done, documented, and archived, but his work has never entertained that. “Black Futures Matter,” he says. “Forever and always.”

Animated protest scene from WAVES with raised fists and yellow signs reading "No Justice No Peace," "Say Their Names," and "BLM"
Courtesy of Jason Raymond

In his recent animated short Waves, a young Black boy stands in the ocean and tries to scrub gold off his skin, but it won’t come off. His father watches from the shore, and instead of helping him wash it away, he challenges his son to look at it differently. What follows is a montage of Black cultural memory so tender it catches you somewhere between the throat and the chest. The film has one thing to say, and it says it cleanly: don’t try to wash yourself away. Find your flow.

It started in an Animation Narrative class at Pratt, where his professor, Shayla Lawz, gave one instruction: choose an object with a story. Jason chose a gold pan, because his parents are from the Gold Coast, and something in the image of sifting through sand in search of value was already deeply personal to him. Then Lawz screened the music video for Kamasi Washington’s “Truth” which features a boy washing his face as time and community unfold around him with the years collapsing like a wave, and the two images clicked. He thought of a Black boy trying to wash magic off his skin, and he had a film. “Loving the parts of yourself you can’t erase is something I practice every day,” he says. “Waves is the piece I found along the journey.”

The emotional core is the father-son reunion on the shore. Jason’s father, by his own account, is not gentle. He’s the tough-love type, love that teaches without always knowing how to soften, but what Jason wanted to make was the other kind. “I knew I had a desire in me for a love that is gentle, that is kind, that is understanding,” he says. “I wanted to create a world where Black love could be like water—strong, powerful, crushing, still, calm, and soothing.” He built it out of the tenderness he’d received from mentors, coaches, and friends over the years, taking what they poured into him and putting it on screen. He shared with us that holding both things at once, the boy’s vulnerability and his sense of isolation, without letting either tip the other over was the real challenge. “Creating that emptiness was a really hard balance,” he reveals. The scene that dazzles most, though, is the one connecting the protagonist to all of his ancestors through the gold on his skin. “I wanted the audience to feel surrounded by community. Embraced by a golden love. I wanted it to reach the parts of ourselves we forget.”

Still from WAVES showing an animated father holding his young son close, the boy's skin glowing gold, both standing in still water at dusk
Courtesy of Jason Raymond

In 2021, he visited Ghana and met family he’d only ever known as names overheard from a living room couch, and meeting them in person reshuffled something essential about his sense of home, about how big a story he was already a part of. “The ocean between the States and Ghana is not just distance,” he reflects. “It’s a story deeper than I ever imagined.”

Telling that story through magical realism came from conviction, not aesthetics. “I think magical realism is the perfect genre for Black stories,” he says. “We have endured so much suffering as a people and found joy. We created art, music, films, families, and to do that when the world is against you is nothing short of a superpower.” 

Animated barbershop scene from WAVES with a barber cutting a young child's hair while family members watch from nearby seats
Courtesy of Jason Raymond

His creative process is controlled chaos, and he means it as a compliment to both words. Inspiration is not something he waits on, instead he feeds it from every direction: conversations overheard on the train, a farmer’s market, or a magic chicken. You’ll have to ask him about the last one. “The work is stringing those ideas together,” he says, meaning the alchemy of it, the part where three unrelated things become one story. Deep in a project, his wall becomes a command center of post-it notes, his sketchbooks fill with webs of connected thoughts, and everything gets torn out and cut up and rearranged until something sticks, but when the stress piles too high, he goes back to the shows that made him fall in love with animation in the first place—Steven Universe, Code Lyoko, Moomin. When even that isn’t enough, he hits the volleyball court. “The ideas flow easier after I’ve been moving,” he says.

Beyoncé is somewhere in the curriculum too. “The way she shoots her visuals really helped me understand how I want to portray Blackness in my work,” he explains. To him, it’s a masterclass in celebrating Black beauty and strength, and he has been studying it accordingly.

Animating on paper is still on the list. The industry, he says with a quiet confidence that borders on a warning, is not ready. In the meantime, the one thing he wishes someone had told him earlier: there will always be someone eager to tell you your idea isn’t worth making, isn’t interesting or won’t amount to anything. “If you love it,” he says, “there is always something worthwhile.”

That’s also the sentence he’d send back to the Columbus kid who drew his way into rooms and painted headlines and spent his whole childhood making space for people on paper. Or maybe it’s the simpler one. The one that’s the thesis of everything he makes, and everything he still has left to make. “You are already everything you need to be.”

Written by: HQ

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