Animation, Animation, Animation

I thought we would jump in straight into this massive genre with Mika's Lollipop.
Just a quick note, this video was made by a collective of French animators all with their own styles and then edited together to blend it in to a seamless whole.


Animated videos, probablly started with Beatles when they made Yellow submarine. Now I say probablly, because I don't really know and I am not sure you can count early avaunt-garde film makers expirements with visuals and sound as a music video promo. So for the sake of argument lets say commercial video promo started with the Beatles and move on.

For ease of discussion I have divided this blog in to three types of animation, (so not just a clever title) Stop frame, 2D and CGI. Now I realise a lot of 2D is done on computers but lets not get bogged down in semantics.

Stop frame animated video were massively popular in the 80's an like most things in the eighties with hindsight fairly ill advised. So here's a quick tour of some the best and worst...

Jackie Wilson - Reet Petite


Nina Simone - My Baby Just Cares for Me


Wax - Building a Bridge, brief warning this will hurt your eyes and may cause neausea.


The Firm - Star Trekking


Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer is great example of how good it can be.


The infullence of the videos can be seen in more modern examples like Adam and Jo's Sweet Johnny for Gorky's Zygotic Mynci

BTW that really is Richard Ashcroft in cameo-ing in that video. Also in another side note Adam Buxton has now taken over the music video show case (Antenna, now called BUG) at the BFI, if your in London check it out.

For regular readers (who am I kidding, reader) of this blog, may be wondering how I have got this far with out mentioning Michel Gondrey. Undoubtedly the master of this sort of thing.

So here he is talking about the process with the White Stripes for Fell in Love with a Girl.


Animated videos are cheap and effective way making music promo, but you do need patience. Anyway, here is Michel animating wool for Kiwi's Sterogram - Wakie Takie Man, rather than lego

Moving on to 2D or traditional animation

Daft Punk Released their own Yellow Submarine style full length video Interstella 5555, which was a visual reworking of their Album discover by Anime icon Leiji Matsumoto (of space battle ship Yamemoto fame). The vids for singles all featured squences from the film. Which to me look a bit like a piss poor episode of Robotec (maybe that's the idea). Anyway...

Daft Punk - Stronger, Harder, Faster.


Now I ain't the biggest Britney fan but the new album has some good stuff on it and this video is a much better example of how good a manga inspired video can be than Daft Punk. Watch Britney Spears go all Aeon Flux (sorry couldn't find an embededable one so fallow the link)
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC2vy18rkho

Blur - Good Song, Shynola and artist David Shrigley team up.


Wagon Christ - Shadows

I love that video, I love that the action is never really explained.


Computer Animation

Surely, the iconic promo for computer animation has to Dire Straits - Money for nothing.

So iconic has it been that it has been used in a thousand parodies. The next video is cheerful homage by rising star Nima Nourizadeh, who seems to be making a decent living out Hot Chip check out his myspace page. Chromeo- bonafide lovin'


CGI doesn't often get stuck in the animation bracket but it has every reason to in my opinion as all the same principles apply, except that you trying to make it look real.
Hammer and Tongs did a great job with the effects on this video esp on a tight-ish budget they are as good as any big blockbuster.
Chemical brothers - believe



Lyrics born and Quannum - I changed my Mind, This was another Shynola vid, I really like the use of 3D wire frames in this video. Apparently the urban legend around this video is that they ran out of rendering time so never got to finish the 3D skins, I think its all the better for it.


Well that is it for a brief history of animated videos. So thanks again for taking the time to read, and as always a very big thank you the YouTube and it users. This I think will be the last long post for awhile, I am going to try and keep then shorter and more regular for a bit.

And now for something completely different to end on, as I was in fact today nearly covered in bees...