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10 Kids Cartoon Characters Reimagined As ADULTS

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Somewhere on DeviantArt, Ash Ketchum finally got his growth spurt.

A wave of fan art has been quietly rewriting the rules of children’s animation, taking characters who’ve been frozen at age ten for two decades and aging them up into fully realized grown-ups. The trend spans dozens of illustrators and hundreds of pieces, but a handful of artists keep surfacing as the ones fans point to first. Their work forms the backbone of “10 Kids Cartoon Characters Reimagined As ADULTS,” a rundown of the redesigns that have gained the most traction online.

• Illustrators including Russia’s Jorn Siberian, Jackson Tjota, and Tohad have built followings specifically for aging up cartoon characters while keeping their iconic markers intact.
• Ash Ketchum gets reimagined as a seasoned, adult Pokémon trainer who still wears his signature cap and jacket, often drawn in a more Westernized animation style than the original anime.
• The Powerpuff Girls, Arnold Shortman from Hey Arnold!, the Rugrats toddlers, Dexter from Dexter’s Laboratory, Dora the Explorer, the Ed, Edd n Eddy trio, and Charlie Brown are all given adult redesigns in the video’s rundown.

The Artists Driving the Trend

None of this is coming from Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, or Warner Bros. It’s coming from independent illustrators posting to DeviantArt and social media, working entirely outside any studio’s approval process. Jorn Siberian, Jackson Tjota, and Tohad are singled out as three of the names whose reimaginings keep circulating because they don’t just slap stubble on a cartoon kid — they rework anatomy, proportion, and shading to make the character look like a plausible grown version of themselves rather than a costume.

The appeal is in the restraint. A good aged-up Ash Ketchum still has the cap, the fingerless gloves, the messy hair — the pieces that make him recognizable at a glance — even as the artist swaps in a more mature jawline, taller frame, and the kind of shading you’d see in a Western superhero comic rather than a Saturday-morning anime cel.

The Powerpuff Girls Get a Superhero Makeover

Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup are treated less like grown-up preschoolers and more like a proper superhero team in these redesigns, with artists leaning into modern comic-book styling — sharper costumes, more defined musculature, and poses lifted straight from mainstream action comics. It’s a version of the trio that looks like it could headline its own ongoing series rather than a half-hour cartoon aimed at six-year-olds.

Dora the Explorer, reimagined with a bow and arrow as a rugged survivalist, is about as far as any of these redesigns stray from the source material — and it’s exactly why the image keeps getting shared.

Nickelodeon’s Kids All Grow Up Together

The Nickelodeon side of the list leans on nostalgia as much as artistry. Arnold Shortman from Hey Arnold! gets pushed into adulthood, and the entire Rugrats ensemble — Tommy, Chuckie, Phil, Lil, and the rest of the toddler crew — is aged through high school and beyond, giving longtime viewers a version of the gang they can picture actually growing up alongside them. Dexter from Dexter’s Laboratory and the Ed, Edd n Eddy trio get similar treatment, aged into teenagers and young adults still recognizable by their signature hair, glasses, or wardrobe quirks.

Charlie Brown and the Peanuts Gang

Even Charles Schulz’s Peanuts characters aren’t spared the aging-up treatment, with Charlie Brown drawn as a young adult by fan artists working within the same trend. It’s a notably different exercise than the Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network redesigns, since Peanuts characters were built around a deliberately simple, minimalist art style — meaning any “mature” version has to decide how much of that flatness to sacrifice for realism.

None of these redesigns are officially sanctioned reboots, and none of the studios involved have signaled plans to actually age their characters up on screen. That’s part of what keeps the trend alive on DeviantArt rather than in a boardroom — artists like Jorn Siberian and Tohad can keep pushing Ash Ketchum, the Powerpuff Girls, and the Rugrats crew into new territory without waiting on anyone’s greenlight.