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| Animated Pop Vids,
Gorillaz, Daft Punk & Robbie |
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| Media,
Graham Bower,
12 March 2001 |
Rating: F5
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Gorillaz – Clint Eastwood
http://www.gorillaz.com/
Daft Punk – One More Time
http://www.virginrecords.com/daft_punk/index2.html
Robbie Williams – Let love be you energy
http://www.robbiewilliams.com
Funny isn’t it, that just as the hoards start to desert en mass, things start to get interesting. Animation is a case in point.
Animated feature films have died a death in the last year – Chicken Run was surely the final straw – but Disney insists on putting the boot in with The Emperor’s New Groove. Over a decade ago, Disney’s Black Cauldron put what seemed at the time to be the final nail in the coffin. Audiences simply weren’t interested in animated features any more. In the years that followed, we languished in a cartoon wilderness, occasionally punctuated by Rolf Harris’s cartoon time.
A decade later, re-enter Disney with a whole new arsenal of digital tricks up their sleeves. Movies like Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin set an new standard in movie animation, and for a while they were kind of interesting, if you like that kind of thing. But one too many formulaic offerings resulted in the inevitable “good guy + beautiful girl + cute talking animal sidekicks + baddie + evil but not very evil and kind of cute talking animal side kicks = death of a genre x2.” The sickly schmaltzy biblical animation blockbuster from Dreamworks didn’t help either.
So, with such a bleak scenario, where can I possibly find a grain of hope for animation? Why the pop promo of course. Suddenly cartoons are all the vogue. Indeed, Damon “Blur” Albarn and Jamie “Tank Girl” Hewitt are taking animation to its pop music limits by developing a 100% animated band Gorillaz. They’re even planning a live concert, but how that will work I’ve no idea. The Gorillaz “Clint Eastwood” video is a stunning piece of work – mixing 3D effects with stunning 2D cell animation and some excellent characters, it is perhaps Hewitt’s best piece of work to date, and gives a taste of what the Tank Girl movie might have been. If only. The high point is undoubtedly a troupe of dancing gorillas bursting out of the ground and paying homage to the Michael Jackson Thriller dance.
An honourable mention should go to Robbie Williams new promo, Let Love be your Energy. It’s a bit like a saucy version of Mario 64, although the attempt to mix 3D polygons with a flat cell animation style is more reminiscent of Sega’s Jet Set Radio. Whatever, the fact that it looks like a video game is a bit sad – think how dated Pong looks now, and imagine how impressed we’ll all be by this technological tour-de-force in a few years time. A little less technology and a little more concept may help.
But the mother of all animated vids doing the rounds right now has to be Daft Punk’s stunning “One More Time” promo. Evoking the fantastic eighties hand draw cell animation made so popular by French-Japanese classics like Battle of the Planets (La Bataille des Planètes), this is so beautiful it almost brought a tear to my eye. I can’t heap enough praise on this opus – watch it for yourself and be sucked back into the dizzy nostalgia of weekday afternoons at 4.30pm, home from school watching Childrens BBC whilst your mum does the vacuum cleaning under for feet. Perfect.
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