Italian Brainrot: What is this bizzare children's trend and should parents be wary of it?

The short answer is that it's a social media trend that has caught on like wildfire since emerging at the beginning of this year, featuring a large number of AI-generated characters - often with accompanying songs, or voiceovers in Italian.

In the first half of 2025, she racked up over 55 million views on TikTok and four million likes, mostly from tweens glued to their cellphones. Not bad for an artificial intelligence-generated cartoon ballerina with a cappuccino teacup for a head.

Her name is Ballerina Cappuccina. Her smiling, girlish face is accompanied by a deep, computer-generated male voice singing in Italian — or, at least, some Italian. The rest is gibberish.

She is one of the most prominent characters in the internet phenomenon known as “Italian Brain Rot," a series of memes that exploded in popularity this year, consisting of unrealistic AI-generated animal-object hybrids with absurdist, pseudo-Italian narration.

The trend has baffled parents, to the delight of young people experiencing the thrill of a new, fleeting cultural signifier that is illegible to older generations.

The first Italian brain-rot character was Tralalero Tralala, a shark with blue Nike sneakers on his elongated fins. Early Tralalero Tralala videos were scored with a curse-laden Italian song that sounds like a crude nursery rhyme.

Other characters soon emerged: Bombardiro Crocodilo, a crocodile-headed military airplane; Lirilì Larilà, an elephant with a cactus body and slippers; and Armadillo Crocodillo, an armadillo inside a coconut, to name a few.

These videos have proven so popular that they have launched catchphrases that have entered mainstream culture for Generation Alpha, which describes anyone born between 2010 and 2025.

In fact, content creators around the world have created entire storylines told through these intentionally ridiculous songs.

So what exactly is Italian Brainrot? It’s a social media trend featuring nonsensical characters generated by AI, often a hybrid of animals and other objects - a crocodile crossed with a bomber aircraft, a chimpanzee crossed with a banana, or a cat crossed with a shrimp. 

Some of the characters have their own songs or one-line stories explaining who they are/their catchphrases, often featuring lyrics (also nonsensical) in Italian. 

As its name suggests, it’s silly, childish stuff - catnip for kids of a certain age, i.e. Gen Alpha.

Like most memes and trends these days, it originated on TikTok at the beginning of 2025, with the character Tralalero Tralala - a three-legged shark wearing blue Nike trainers - created by a TikTok user called @eZburger401. 

The trend soon caught on, and more and more characters emerged - the sillier, the better - all with an accompanying gibberish narrative. The trend caught fire so rapidly that it’s already spawned a multitude of remixes, become a hugely popular Roblox game and inspired numerous memecoins (a cryptocurrency). 

So massively popular was the trend that controversial Hungarian PM Viktor Orban even bizarrely posted one - featuring Tung Tung Tung Sahur in his office - on his own TikTok page.

Much like skibidi toilet, Italian brainrot really leans into the absurd; it’s weirdness for the sake of weirdness. That’s the joke. That’s the punchline. And while you or I might furrow our brow and think, what the actual hell am I looking at? Gen Alpha seems to delight in this entirely pointless and highly-addictive content.

Also, the ease and speed with which these videos can be produced on accessible tools such as ChatGPT has helped with the meme’s spread - You can prompt the AI to visualise Bombardiro Crocodilo (for example) in a setting or scenario of your choice, or come up with a new character in that Italian brain rot style. 

The trend has also crossed into gaming. On Roblox, one of the platform’s most popular games was "Steal a Brainrot," where players compete to collect characters. 

The competition became so heated that accusations of "admin abuse" - administrators unfairly taking characters - sent some kids into meltdowns, with viral videos showing them hysterical and in tears.

While it’s totally harmless at surface level - and has become so huge that there is already talk of movie cash-ins, a deeper dive will reveal that actually it gets sinister very quickly. 

While the narratives of each character are largely nonsensical gibberish - and in Italian, at that - the translated versions of others are deeply offensive. 

For instance, Tralalero Tralala’s lyrics refer to both God and Allah as being farmyard animals and Bombadiro Crocodilo is similarly dark, glibly making reference to "bombing children in Gaza and Palestine".

Frankly, not really the sort of things you want your kids singing in the schoolyard or at that family dinner table.

So why are kids obsessed with Italian Brainrot? According to Dr. Sanam Hafeez, neuropsychologist and director of Comprehend the Mind, this type of content “instantly grabs kids' attention because it's designed to overload their senses by providing quick, high-reward dopamine hits without requiring much focus or thought.” 

Plus, the expert notes that kids are naturally drawn to novelty and silliness, which this trend delivers in spades—and at a rapid-fire pace that keeps them glued to the screen.

So should you be concerned if your child goes down the brainrot rabbit hole? Well, a little. 

Dr. Hafeez explains that this media trend doesn’t actually rot the brain, per se, but regular exposure to it can condition the developing brain in some not-so-desirable ways.

“This kind of media can make it harder for young brains to tolerate slower-paced or less stimulating activities—like reading, doing homework, or even having a conversation," he says. 

"Attention fragmentation, decreased tolerance for frustration, and impaired abilities to think deeply are all possible consequences. Children may eventually develop an appetite for incessant stimulation and battle boredom or tasks requiring sustained concentration.”

Some experts have also expressed concern that watching Italian Brainrot videos on the likes of YouTube can quickly encourage the algorithm to send kids down a rabbit hole of much more sinister brainrot content that is certainly not age-appropriate.

For many young fans, the appeal is that the content makes no sense at all.

"It’s funny because it’s nonsense," Italian animator Fabian Mosele, who has created viral brain-rot videos, told the AP. "Seeing something so dark, in a way, and out of the ordinary, that breaks all the norms of what we would expect to see on TV — that’s just super appealing."