Music Video Analysis
Above is one of my favorite music videos of the 80s (or rather it's debatable to be my favorite of all time) entitled Take On Me by A-Ha, featuring a action/romance narrative between singer Morten Harket and a young woman. This music video hosts rotoscope animation, tedious-as-all-hell form of art. It's a style whereas certain elements of a live-action sequence are 'painted' or 'sketched' over in a pre-chosen medium and coexist between our own reality and its own. What really knocks me out and impresses others who watch it with me is the camera panning to the right, showing us both sides of the magical looking glass, which filters reality with the comic book sketch animation.
The lyrics combine both his romantic interest in the actress (Bunty Bailey, btw) and the recurring plot line that is he's being chased by two jealous thugs who want him dead all because he beat them in a motorcycle race briefly scene in comic form at the very beginning. In the meantime that's put off to have pulled the young woman into his 'world', the comic she was reading in ours, in a diner. While all this is going on the waitress crushes the comic because, well, the girl vanished without paying for coffee. The animation is very fluid and seeing our lead actors have a good time gives a cheery vibe, that is until the thugs catch up to Harket and Bailey then proceed to chase them through a labyrinth of crumpled paper. There are a ton of angled shots, primarily in sketched form to show the intensity of the situation they're in however while singing the camera's usually static with a few moving parts. Every now and then we'd get a cutaway to live action band members playing keyboard/drums/etc.
When Harket and Bailey are cornered and there's no way out he 'rips' a page open so she can escape into the real world so she proceeds to grab the comic from the waste basket, run home and finish reading it to find out what happened to the hero. For those (and previous) shots the camera moves from one panel to the next as we would read something. In the very beginning it's a combination of static panels and animated ones. Lack of consistency? Not really because in the end, Bailey beats against the panel walls and dissolves from the comic entirely and eventually materializes in the real world where they both hug. The song has been parodied a few times, most notably in an early episode of Family Guy (as seen here). It's always good to see a rotoscoped piece, as it is very uncommon to see. This one's been reported to have taken artists 16 painstaking weeks to render ~3,000 frames.
The lyrics combine both his romantic interest in the actress (Bunty Bailey, btw) and the recurring plot line that is he's being chased by two jealous thugs who want him dead all because he beat them in a motorcycle race briefly scene in comic form at the very beginning. In the meantime that's put off to have pulled the young woman into his 'world', the comic she was reading in ours, in a diner. While all this is going on the waitress crushes the comic because, well, the girl vanished without paying for coffee. The animation is very fluid and seeing our lead actors have a good time gives a cheery vibe, that is until the thugs catch up to Harket and Bailey then proceed to chase them through a labyrinth of crumpled paper. There are a ton of angled shots, primarily in sketched form to show the intensity of the situation they're in however while singing the camera's usually static with a few moving parts. Every now and then we'd get a cutaway to live action band members playing keyboard/drums/etc.
When Harket and Bailey are cornered and there's no way out he 'rips' a page open so she can escape into the real world so she proceeds to grab the comic from the waste basket, run home and finish reading it to find out what happened to the hero. For those (and previous) shots the camera moves from one panel to the next as we would read something. In the very beginning it's a combination of static panels and animated ones. Lack of consistency? Not really because in the end, Bailey beats against the panel walls and dissolves from the comic entirely and eventually materializes in the real world where they both hug. The song has been parodied a few times, most notably in an early episode of Family Guy (as seen here). It's always good to see a rotoscoped piece, as it is very uncommon to see. This one's been reported to have taken artists 16 painstaking weeks to render ~3,000 frames.
A classic! Good analysis.
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