The impact anime and animation has had on the music video world has only steadily increased ever since A-ha’s “Take On Me” (that’s right) wowed the public with its then avant-garde visuals (recently heavily borrowed from by Paramore for “Caught in the Middle“). Over time, the finely tuned art form would become more common in the music video realm, particularly for those musicians from the UK. From Radiohead (“Paranoid Android,” “Burn the Witch”) to Gorillaz (basically every video they’ve ever done), the presence of animation has only felt more natural–nay, expected–over time. Especially when taking into account that everyone yearns for artificiality to reign supreme, creating, in turn, musicians and personas of a largely synthetic nature.
Blazing the trail before all, as usual, was Daft Punk, who came out with a visual album (long before motherfucking Beyoncé) in 2003 called Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem to accompany the musical narrative of Discovery. Finagling their longtime childhood hero of anime, Leiji Matsumoto, to serve as visual supervisor for the project, the sixty-five minute production ultimately took three years to complete and four million dollars to produce. Detailing, essentially, the premise of 2001’s Josie and the Pussycats, a band is abducted and mind controlled by Earl de Darkwood, who kidnaps bands in order to acquire 5,555 gold records that will enable him to assert power over the entire universe (in 2003, this was still believable, as music, at that point, continued to hold clout with its goodness).
Elsewhere in the modernization and normalization of anime is Madonna, who has never shied away from the innovative, and first employed animation in the little known video for her perhaps also little known 1989 song, “Dear Jessie,” a love note to longtime producer Patrick Leonard’s daughter. In 2000, Madonna revisited the medium for “Music” (an ode to feminine masculinity) as a result of being unable to do many action sequences in her state of pregnancy, therefore employing the tool of animation to make her seem more dynamic as she beat the shit out of a gang of thugs. Her appreciation for the alternate world animation lends voice to came again in 2006, with “Get Together.” Directed by Venice Beach-based Logan Studios and wielding the drawings of Nathaniel Howe with Italian comic book artist Milo Manara’s style in mind, “Get Together” became something of an homage to the genesis of life, with footage of Madonna from her performance at London’s KOKO Club in November 2005 being set against the evolving backdrops of volcanoes to skyscrapers.
With these two very distinct yet similar visuals in mind as an important part of animation history in the music video world, the release of CHVRCHES (not content to stop at the output of their recent album, Love is Dead) and J-pop band Wednesday Campanella’s new single, “Out of My Head,” bears a remarkable resemblance in many respects to the aforementioned pieces of pop culture. For starters, it commences in an intergalactic setting, with two subway trains hurtling past one another in the shape of an X. Conceived by anime gurus Junichi Yamamoto and Yoshiki Imazu, Wednesday Campanella’s Kom_I literally floats through life with an air of uncertainty, as though her own band might be hijacked and mind controlled at any minute by a malicious presence. And, considering her comment on the track, “The world is not yet changed and we can never have completely assured lives in this era. So I wrote this for giving a pep talk to myself who is being left half done,” it’s no wonder the feel of the video is so fraught (with giant hamburgers and all, perhaps a subconscious reference to a general fear of America and Trump).
With the cityscape swirling past Kom_I, the “Get Together” vibe is strong. And as she overlooks the “real world” from her own perch above, Lauren Mayberry chanting, “I need outta my outta my outta my head,” we get the immediate sense that Kom_I feels much safer in her anime state, even, at one point, blowing up the real city with a bubblegum machine gun.
Riding the subway car at the speed of light, the two trains crossing one another ultimately, of course, represent the melding of CHVRCHES and Wednesday Campanella’s styles, or as Kom_I phrased it, “Kawasaki meets Glasgow, Kiyoshiro Imawano meets David Bowie, and Edamame meets Fish & Chips.” Or, rather, “Get Together” meets Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem.
A beautiful addition to the anime-oriented music video canon, “Out of My Head” also accents how the visual language of music is so intertwined at this juncture–and it’s a beautiful thing when viewers actually know how to interpret it. How to look at one frame and see that it stemmed from everything before it.
