13 Animated Music Videos Done Right

Year: 2002

Director: Michel Gondry

Some of director Michel Gondry's best work came around the same time the White Stripes were were starting to get huge, like their  song "Fell In Love With A Girl" for example. This video really has a simple concept—if you watch interviews with Gondry you can see how excited he gets by simple ideas—but that one idea, turn your rock stars into legos, served as a jumping off point for all sorts of experiments in movement and color. The video became a watershed moment for both the White Stripes and Gondry. Besides, what could be better than rock and roll and legos?

Year: 2012

Directors: Becky Sloan & Joseph Pelling

One of the many things animation can do that "real" footage can't is referred to as "infinite regression"—it's that kaleidoscope effect, an image blooms, then disappears while the next image emerges the foundation of what came before it. If that makes no sense whatsoever and your shoulders just dropped in a deep, frustrated exhale, just watch Tame Impala's video for "It Feels Like We Only Go Backwards." After a few examples, you'll understand.

Tame Impala carved their own niche in the psychedelic, indie rock world by creating a sound that combines a swimming, colorful trippiness with the best elements of classic rock, almost like what the Beatles could have sounded like if their acid trip had continued through the '70s. Due to John's incredibly sad and untimely death, we're left to wonder where the Beatles would've progressed to, and, enjoy the offshoots that come from inspiration. Imitation is the highest form of flattery, right?

Year: 2000

Director: Kazuhisa Takenouchi

Daft Punk's video for "One More Time" actually uses clips from a much bigger, feature-length animated film that the French duo were involved in. Directed by Kazuhisa Takenouchi alongside Daft Punk themselves, and under the visual supervision of Leiji Matsumoto, the film Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem was a visual representation of the Discovery album, and used each track from the album to soundtrack an episode in the story of an alien band who is captured, brought to earth, and taken advantage of by an evil Earl.

Needless to say, it's great fun, and if you enjoy the lovingly animated, lush, technicolor masterpiece that is the "One More Time," you should definitely check out the film itself.

Year: 2003

Director: Shynola

Josh Homme is a badass—fact—and this video, with its striking red and black color scheme, car chase, and femme fatale, just confirms that. Gritty, stylish, and with a trippy, psychedelic ending, it's is everything you'd want from a Queens of the Stone Age visual, matching the band's raw rock vibe with aplomb.

Homme wanted something you could bang your head against the wall to, and the hellish desert landscape that resulted could certainly fit the bill. But it's beautiful despite, cameras swerving wildly around a pickup shooting down a blood-red desert highway.

The band's in the truck's bed, wailing away in rotoscoped glory and making gratuitous sexual metaphors they apparently think the animation will hide. Great stuff.

Year: 2008

Director: Hype Williams

In retrospect, Kanye West's blue period of 808's was the turning point, the moment when expectations and manners kind of went out the window. Musically, it ushered in a whole new era that is now a major influence on how we're digesting popular music. But, back then, Kanye was just trying any and everything that seemed like a departure from what he had tried before. This animated cut of "Heartless" is one of those. And like most things 'Ye touches, it ain't half bad. The animation isn't spectacular, the narrative isn't really a factor, but the man knows how to make a good product. The color alone tells the story here. Check the video out below:

Year: 2011

Animators: Chris Milk & Anthony Francisco Sheppard

These two collaborated on a beautiful album a couple years back called Rome, yet another chapter in the book Danger Mouse is writing about music. The man wears many hats. "Two against One" is a beautiful example of the crackling-western-campfires sound that the duo crept into, brooding guitars and chromatic harmonies creeping and crawling around the sinuous voice of Jack White.

Moral of this story: don't hunt. This video is described by its creators as "a fever dream...his backstory, his life before the tale we see in the movie." Yup. Chris Milk signed on to do a feature length version of the nightmarish whirlpool below you: a man shoots a deer, said deer begins to haunt man from the dead, and kills his entire family one by one. Enjoy!

Year: 2012

Director: RUFFMERCY

It might not have been necessary to even morph Danny Brown's face for this video. You could have put him in front of a camera, maybe pointed a strobe light directly into his eyes and just asked him to make faces. Next time. For now, we got some crazy transformations of the face that makes America swoon. Danny turns into a skull, a lizard, a variety of demons, and back into himself.

The video really moves and there's a liveliness to the graffiti background and self-referential cartoons that engages you on a number of different levels at once. Yet, at the same time, there's almost no movement. It's the same wall the whole time. All we need to do to make it infinite is change the details.

Year: 2009

Director: Encyclopedia Pictura

This grandiose and sweeping video for Björk's grandiose and sweeping "Wanderlust" is a sign of things to come. 3D may not have taken over Hollywood like the studios were praying it would, but it has a better chance of succeeding in the music video market. Shorter runtime means shorter necessary attention span. The visuals can serve only themselves, as opposed to creating an emotional connection that will last for 90 minutes. The video was produced by the Encyclopedia Pictura collective. If this kind of thing interests you, check out the making of.

Year: 2009

Director: Allison Schulnik

Grizzly Bear is able to make sad music without being too depressing. It's a rare feat, and part of the reason it works is because of videos like this one. They're able to pass that sentiment from sound to image: sure, it's a sad clay monster moping around the forest, but the thing looks so ridiculous you can't help but shoot out a snort or two at its expense.

Allison Schulnik creates a story told in clay stop-motion. It's one of the simplest, most mesmerizing ways to capture motion. You end up identifying with this rainbow-puke monster, looking into his adorable black holes where the eyes should be and knowing yourself a little more by the time you look away.

Year: 2012

Directors: Daniel Garcia and Harry Teitelman

One of the best infographics I've ever seen. That's the only thought that popped into my head after seeing Killer Mike's "Reagan" for the first time. Once you watch the video, you might think that's a little pessimistic of me, but regardless of whether or not you agree with him, Killer Mike's message is illustrated picture-perfectely with Garcia and Teitelman's visuals.

America's historical relationship with slave ownership is laid out unflinchingly, a visual memory of Reagan's role as a puppet for corporate interests. The prison system is at the core of Killer Mike's arguments here, but what really makes the video bang is the incredible track behind it. Have a listen below.

Year: 2001

Directors: Jamie Hewlett and Pete Candeland

The whole Gorillaz project is based around more than just music. Though it is often forgotten amidst the praise for Damon Albarn's multi-facted genius, Gorillaz is a music and visual project, with British artist Jamie Hewlett a co-creator alongside Albarn. Gorillaz are a virtual band, with whole virtual worlds that they inhabit, and have produced numerous brilliant animated videos in ther time. "Clint Eastwood" is in no way the most complex of Gorillaz' videos, but the creepy simplicity and the dead-eyed, blank stares of the animated characters are a perfect accompaniment, and introduction, to the weird world of 2D, Murdoc, and Noodle.

Year: 2008

Directors: Brian Palmer & Brad Palmer

When TV On The Radio gets frantic, there are few who can match their collective anxiety. Frontman Tunde Adebimpe jumps octaves like curbs, and the video is a collection of dizzying patterns to back up that sound. It's everything you wanted math to be in middle school, fractals bending into all sorts of fractured images lying on top of one another.

The directors collaborated with Adebimpe throughout the process, and we get a geometric Escher-world that the band uses as a stage. The sound seems to bounce off the walls, and the walls are changing faster than they change switch notes. The video is a collage, a series of cut-and-paste processes meant to invoke Dali's absurdism. The band has also likened the video to the media overload of the internet age.

Year: 2008

Director: Chris Milk

We get another visit from Mr. Milk, the co-director behind Danger Mouse's other song on this list, "Two Against One." This time Milk's here for Gnarls Barkley, but the darkness inherent to his other work still shines through. And look, its Jorma!

True, his efforts here are not strictly animation. But when that mouth opens up and starts singing, you know you're outside the waking world. Super gross, super original stuff.

Year: 2013

Directors: OJ Hays and Andrew Straw

Chance The Rapper can make joyous music. It's not the only thing he can do, but it was "Good Ass Intro" leading the way on Acid Rap that showed Chance at his most lively. The horns take over immediately, swooping through gospel tones and you can envision him dancing with the choir—it's a choir that claims John Legend as a member.

OJ Hays and Andrew Straw create a psychedelic landscape—Chance is transformed into bits of fabric in a patchwork quilt of color while he raps. His body is dismembered and dyed, twisted into a mosaic through space, creating another world of infinite regression that is fantastically magnificent.

But then the video cuts hard, and just for a moment you're back in downtown Chicago, looking at the skyscrapers for a split second before the buildings are coated in animation. Marina City is quickly transformed into the corn cob it was always meant to be, and Chance's talent and creativity is once again the main event. But here and throughout the album there are constant, unobtrusive reminders that the massacre Chance references is real and ongoing.

Extra points for the animated pigeons and planes.