At the end of 1989, Europeans were treated to a fourth single from Madonna’s Like A Prayer album, an unusual-for-her-style number called “Dear Jessie.” With its baroque and psychedelic elements, the song was quickly compared to something from The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper era with its barrage of string arrangements and trumpets all combining for the perfect modern lullaby. And indeed, it was written in homage to Patrick Leonard’s daughter, Jessie, after he brought his child to the studio during M’s recording process. The video concept was the first of its kind for Madonna, perhaps inspired by becoming a similarly pixie-type animated character in the intro for 1987’s Who’s That Girl. She reinvents that role as an 80s-ified Tinkerbell (did the Spice Girls rip her off for “Viva Forever”? Maybe.) overlooking a sleeping child–in a way that only animated female fairies can without being creepy–before the live action aspect incorporates hand-drawn violins bursting out of the radio, the first aspect of London-based company Animation City’s work on the Derek Hayes-directed video.
Many instances seize the chance for a literal re-creation of what M is describing in the song, including, “Ride the rainbow to the other side/Catch a falling star and then take a ride/To the river that sings and the clover that brings good luck to you/It’s all true.” Dua Lipa, who has made no bones about looking to Madonna (and in particular her 2005 album, Confessions on a Dance Floor) for inspiration in the recording and aesthetics for Future Nostalgia, offers a similar psychedelic alternate reality in her latest video for “Hallucinate.” Even if it’s not a track geared toward the under ten set, it’s still complete with the fanciful–including the requisite rainbows and unicorns.
Commencing with Dua Lipa performing on stage for a crowd of non-humans, this element, too, reminds one of Lily Allen being animated as a saucy performer in Mark Ronson’s 2007 video for “Oh My God” (a cover of Kaiser Chiefs). Both cartoon women similarly strut for the crowd, but where Allen seduces a group of real live men, Lipa is happy with the genderless vibes of her robots and star- and heart-headed audience, one of said revelers giving her a flower so that she can pull the same literalism that M does with “Dear Jessie,” this time drinking in the scent of the floret to lyrics that narrate, “I’ma breathe you in till I hallucinate.” And that she does, as she’s taken on a journey, and an endless sea of doors start to open, all of them leading to the fantastical. This means, of course, a bevy of creatures to accompany Dua on her love high. In this sense, there is also a hint of Tove Lo’s recent animated video for “sadder badder cooler” in which the eponymous Sunshine Kitty from her album of the same name helps her “reconcile” with some of her exes. And perhaps this sudden pop star-leaning toward the animated realm that Madonna pioneered in her own late twentieth century music video isn’t a coincidence when taking into account the current climate of everything–the sheer need for a non-tactile, alternate dimension when it comes to generating new visuals to accompany a piece of music. After all, filming restrictions are still quite limiting so long as COVID-19 reigns supreme. Of course, Gorillaz also had plenty of foresight about this, with Damon Albarn perhaps secretly deciding to wield an animated band so he could remain forever young as a frontman.
The stream of animals and otherwise whimsical beings (even Humpty Dumpty makes a cameo at one point) that emerge from an Alice in Wonderland-like portal into Jessie’s room are later contrasted with the trumpet breakdown at the three-minute mark that allows the instruments to take center stage. The violins at the end then go back into the radio, the job of cajoling Jessie into dreamland now complete. Lipa’s aim, instead, seems to be to get everyone to stay up all night (not that time exists where she’s been transported to), dancing it up with the fantastical entities that look like they were pulled from a vintage concession stand ad–you know, the kind that would be shown right before a movie to urge patrons to buy snacks.
Directed by Lisha Tan of the animation collective known as The Mill, Lipa’s odyssey into a part of the twentieth century more closely tied to when “Dear Jessie” came out is telling of her own nostalgia for the past rather than the future, something we all appear to have at this juncture. In fact, the scary ass clown toward the end of the video seems to metaphorically connote that Dua has entered the twenty-first century, hence her suddenly bad trip. Shooting through the galaxy with dolphins, she finds herself against a black backdrop (faintly punctuated with small white stars) in the end… and though there is a smirk on her face, it doesn’t come across as comfortingly as the finale that Jessie gets in M’s video.
