my favorite animated music videos
I’m having trouble thinking of other music videos—whether animated or not—that have really stuck with me or that I periodically rewatch. I guess it’s really just this three.
a-ha - Take on Me (1985)
One day about a year ago, my best friend’s teen son was making fun of this song. SMH. I put the music video on the big-screen TV, explaining that the video is incredible and that, to fully appreciate the song, you really need to see the music video that goes along with it.
A woman sitting in a diner crawls inside a comic book after the comic’s hero—a rotoscoped sketch of the lead singer of a-ha—winks at her. Tricky!! He pulls her into a labyrinth of comic book panels. Then, stepping behind one such panel, he shows her that, in a mirror world, he’s a real, 3D boy, not just an indistinct and appealing flattened sketch of one. (Is this music video about limerence? and the longing for something ‘real’?)
A threat emerges, a conflict ensues, and the sketch of a man tears a rip into the wall of the comic book, allowing the woman to reenter her material world again. Shaken, she races home, crumpled comic book in hand, to see whatever became of him. At the song’s emotional climax, she sees the sketch of a man trying to escape the walled-in confines of a 2D comic book panel—then, the same sketch of a man fighting himself in the hallway of her home, trying to escape his 2D world and fully manifest in her 3D one. Ah! Lovely, and a little bit horrifying, a little bit spine-tingling.
Malajube - Montréal -40° C (2007)
I don’t speak French, but this Québécoise song is about struggling to connect with others in physically isolating circumstances (a difficult winter), struggling with voicelessness, with seemingly speaking a different language to those around you. Apparently the song opens with the narrator’s shocking acknowledgment that he is going through a little bit of slut phase, since he can’t afford the actual expense of a pill-popping habit. (I just learned this.)
Anyway, the music video is gorgeous, if very mid-2000s hipster-coded, with the rock band’s avatars looking like vinyl desk toys as they travel, left to right, on a sort of absurdist hero’s journey. That journey is projected onto a textured cement wall, which real human actors are standing in front of, locked in a sort of constant, detached dialogue with it. The animated drawings behind the humans function as a sort of tangible, metaphorical subtext, illuminating their inner worlds. The animators used the physical seams on the walls as lines demarcating minor shifts in perspective or scale.
In 2006 I’d just moved to San Francisco to start my first (and only) desk job. Until then I’d worked in my best friend’s store/gallery selling designer vinyl toys. I’d also, up until 2007, been a member of the Live Action Cartoonists—an interdisciplinary sequential-art theater troupe where, yeah, we interacted with animated drawings projected onto the wall behind us. (I was also still in an on-off long-term relationship with a motion-graphics animator, who made stuff exactly like this. If you’ve ever watched the opening credits for the TV show Community, I guess you’ve seen his work; that was right when we were breaking up.) At that time, I was terribly homesick for Chicago, and frantic, and depressed, and embarrassed at how depressed I was, and my closest friends were all very angry with me because I’d stopped communicating with them.
So the first time I saw this music video I was like, oh, well, yeah, that’s it, that’s how it goes, that’s how it feels. Turns out I didn’t even need to speak French.
Battles - My Machines (2011)
Not obviously animated, but it is, and it’s beautifully composited, too. “My Machines” is a surreal/hyperreal music video where a single dad loses his kid (red shirt) and then proceeds to fall down an “up” escalator for three minutes and twenty seconds—in what would appear to be a cruel and indifferent cosmos, as narrated by Gary Numan. The glass-sided escalator functions as a sort of nightmarish fishbowl for our hero’s trials.
One of the reasons my adoptive mom went absolutely ballistic on my childhood was because, early on, she lost me on a mall escalator—it happens—and she inexplicably believed I’d been kidnapped, etc etc, and I was never allowed a fully private moment again. She must’ve felt that, if we ever got separated again, I’d die. (Being, as I was, feral, and also, mortified at having gotten separated from her, I was waiting around for her next to a mall exit, anxious and bored.)
The song’s title and spartan lyrics resonate. I remember I’d been trying to make our house more minimalist—stripping down our elaborate smarthome Rube Goldberg machine into a system that, I hoped, would work without constant tending-to or intervention, with fewer Internet of Things devices and more analog devices—and I angrily exclaimed that humans “build things to break” because we “only feel useful when we’re fixing something.” This observation, shouted in a moment of frustration, had made my husband roar with laughter because wasn’t it true? Didn’t we enjoy fiddling with the things we’d constructed? With the subconscious expectation they’d always break again—a manufactured sense of productivity? It’s the reverse of Apple’s onetime “it just works” mantra. Maybe if we had more important things to do, we’d enjoy fiddling around less.
Apparently this music video was made by the Daniels, who would go on to make Swiss Army Man (“the first fart makes you laugh…”) and Everything Everywhere All at Once. Unsurprisingly, one of the Daniels is married to a stop-motion animator—the one who made Marcel the Shell, actually.