Sound and Vision: Rebecca Sugar and friends
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at several songs by Rebecca Sugar, with music video(s) directed by them and their collaborators.
Rebecca Sugar, just recently announced as the director of the new Annapurna Moomin-film also releases a film this week, called The Elephant, co-directed with Pendleton Ward, Patrick McHale and Ian Jones-Quartey. With everyone of those they worked together in the past, including on Adventure Time, where Sugar was a writer.
They are thus far mostly known as creator, show-runner, writer, and sometimes director and songwriter of Steven Universe and its spin-offs. For those not well-versed in everything Steven Universe, it's basically an Americanized Magical Girl Anime series, if the Magical Girl was a young boy, whose chosen family are all queer-coded. Sugar, who is themselves non-binary puts their love for both anime and American pop culture front and center, in what is a delicious blend of action adventure, family comedy and some very heady world-building. Also front and center in the series is music, in a cast involving musicians as diverse as Estelle, Kate Micucci, Aimee Mann, Nicki Minaj, Jon Wurster and Joan Jett. Most of the music in the series was written by Sugar themselves who, in what I belief is the third time for the Sound and Vision, also has directed a music video for their own music as a singer/ songwriter (the first would be David Lynch, the second Johan Renck). All for their new album Lonely Magic.
Why do I go on about the back story of Steven Universe as a sort of Magical Girl anime? Because it is kind of important to know in the context of the first music video I am discussing. The track is called Ice Water,(see below) and focuses on a very young stand-in for Sugar themselves befriending a trio of muses, The Lonely Magic Angels, who are themselves very much inspired by Magical Girl Anime-characters like Sailor Moon.
In a series of Youtube-shorts Sugar introduces the muses as Ache, Rationale and Epiphany. Ache is a stand-in for the creative longing one can feel, the pang of needing to create. Rationale is about creativity as a form of rationality: thinking ahead and about functionality and solutions. The third muse is Epiphany is about the sudden burst of creativity you can get. It is the sort of on the nose, yet beautifully sincere metaphor that Sugar does best, not hiding behind hidden meanings or layers of metaphor. The muses have not-very-creative names, and that is the point: they are what they are and do what they say.
The interesting thing is that the Lonely Magic Angels are coming into focus as the friends Sugar had in art-class, showing the importance they put on bonding, empathy and chosen family in their work. Creativity, in the works of Sugar, is making stuff together. And togetherness is inherently creative.
That there is also a sort of darker real-life undercurrent in here, about Sugar having to leave New York and their partner Ian Jones-Quartey behind when they started to work on Adventure Time, makes this all a bit less twee than it could've been.
The other music videos for Rebecca Sugar's music have in fact been directed by very close collaborators. Ian-Jones Quartey, himself an animator and show-runner of the series O.K. KO directs the music video for This is A Love Song (also featured below), in which both the Sugar-stand-in and The Lonely Magic Angels are heavily featured. The music video is basically a sort of lyric video, but the punchy animation and real feelings behind both the lyrics and story, elevate the project to something genuinely excellent.
Another collaborator is Toby Jones, who wrote and directed for OK. KO, and is the director of AJ Goes to The Dog Park. He directs Sugar in the music video for Hill To Die On (also below) featuring clips from that film. Sugar plays an editor gaining control of their life, while working on a project that looks eerily like AJ Goes To The Dog Park. It is a nice gesture that Sugar lends their song to promote Jones his movie, who gracefully lends his directorial skills in return.
Then we have the many lyric videos (an example of which is featured below), which have been animated by star-animator, and Steven Universe-fan favorite Takafumi Hori, who did a guest-animation stint on Steven Universe: The Movie and also did the intro for the spin-off/ sequel series Steven Universe: Future. Hori is genuinely a master in doing a lot with little, using only the most minimal animation loops to illustrate Sugar in all sorts of everyday scenario's: strolling, strumming their guitar, etc.
All of this is to say that Sugar puts their money where their mouth is. The thesis of Ice Water, and the Lonely Magic Angels, is that you get inspiration from the people in your life, and they get inspired by you in turn. If this album-cycle for Sugar's new music proves one thing, it is exactly that.
