But, as director Jones tells it, with the use of some clever, often beautiful animation as well as abundant archival footage and commentary from a host of sources (including a “memetist”), Pepe was to embark on a strange and terrible journey.

At first, the constant appropriation of the image isn’t too troubling. It starts with fitness videos. “I was just, haha, whatever,” says Furie. But then things get ugly.

The “sad frog” becomes a favored image among users of the anonymous message site 4chan, a culture, one commentator says, “of saying the most offensive thing.” And as Pepe grows more popular and mainstream, with his image used by celebrities like Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj, some users get angry and seek to reclaim the frog from so-called “normies” (normal people).

Pepe pops up as an evil perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks, or as a symbol of hatred against Black people and Jews. He appears surrounded by swastikas, in what one expert calls “the Nazified Pepe.” The frog becomes “this impossible mixture of innocence and evil,” smiling that familiar grin as he commits atrocities, notes another.

And then comes the election, and the candidacy of Donald Trump, and the use of Pepe as a symbol by young supporters. In October 2015, Trump himself retweets an image of him as Pepe.

In one of this jam-packed film’s most effective sequences, director Jones shows us the web message traffic in which an alt right supporter says he is, at that moment, attending a Hillary Clinton rally. People urge him to shout out “Pepe!” And then we see him do it.