In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at selected music videos by Edgar Wright.
Somehow it is a wonder that Edgar Wright has never done a full blown animation feature, nor a full-on traditional musical, especially when looking at his music video output. In his early and recent music video work, he fully embraces animation as a medium, and the musical as a genre, sometimes mixing both to great effect.
One of his early music videos is one of two he made for Charlotte Hatherley. I want to single out Bastardo (see below), where he uses minimal animation and the now somewhat archaic medium of photographed comic books. Bastardo shows the singer in several cut-out-animation style magazine pages, in several interjecting storylines and magazine styles. One of those features a small cameo by Simon Pegg. It's a fairly stilted animation piece, purposefully, and precedes the onomatopoeic style effects of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World for instance. You see a similar use of animation and green-screen in Psychosis Safari, by The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, another music video which clearly precedes some of the slick style of Edgar Wright's feature films.
As for musicals, there is a recent music video I want to dive into: Julia Cumming's My Life (see below) shows the singer in (mostly) a one-take, walking in and out of real-life scenarios, weaving seamlessly into dreamlike musical sequences. It's a masterclass in choreography and style, especially when Wright finally does cut away, several times in quick succession. A lesser director would've not dared such a stylistic break, but here it serves a purpose in both a rhythmic build-up and a depiction of the themes in the song. Editing as ecstasy. It is clearly made by the same director who made Last Night in Soho, having some of that London Chique-sixties style class, even if he couldn't hold up the same energy and restraint for an entire feature.
The greatest music video Edgar Wright has made tho, is for Beck's Colors (see below), in which he blends animation and musical trappings to brilliant effect. We start with just two colors, showing a Busby Berkeley-like sound stage and choreography in only blue, with the characters, Beck and some back-up-dancers, in washed-out monochromatic black and white grey-scales. Then Allison Brie introduces us to a yellow backdrop. The two worlds of color start clashing in stroboscopic intercutting, with some animated overlays to top it off. It uses every trick in the Old Hollywood and silent-cinema book, from Berkeley's kaleidoscopic choreographic patterns, to the colorization of black-and-white footage and painted overlays on (seemingly) the filmstock itself, although the latter effect is done digitally here. When finally the screen explodes in a clash of colors and patterns, it is exhilarating. It is classic cinema, with a modern updated sheen.
Which brings us to another person who loved old Hollywood musicals, and gave them his own spin in the seventies. We need to talk about The Paul Williams connection. Paul Williams, the famous songwriter for luminaries like The Carpenters and The Muppets is mostly known by cinema fans for two things (outside of the aforementioned Muppets): the soundtrack to Bugsy Malone, and starring in, and writing the music for Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise. Bugsy Malone has not only been referenced by Edgar Wright. As mentioned in a Sound and Vision before, Paul Thomas Anderson beat him to the punch with the music video for Fiona Apple's Paper Bag. Edgar Wright's music video for The Bluetones' After Hours (see below) has the added conceit of being a one-taker, but as a reference to Bugsy Malone it is putting less of it's own spin on it than Anderson did. The whole idea is the same as Bugsy Malone, having gangsters and dames being played by young tweens, and having blood and gun violence be replaced by pie-fights.
Phantom of the Paradise, then, famously inspired Daft Punk. The robot helmets of the famous electronic dance duo was inspired by the owl-like mask of the titular protagonist of Phantom of the Paradise, who fights against an antagonist played by Paul Williams. Edgar Wright would direct Daft Punk in a music video for Pharrell Williams' Gust of Wind (see below), where the helmets show up as large floating Zardoz-like stones. Zardoz is not the only inspiration point there, because the floating asian dancers, in flowing dresses, in a forest full of autumn leaves, are straight out of Zhang Yimou's Hero. It shows that Edgar Wright wears his influences on his long flowing sleeves.
Which is why I should mention the final part of the Paul Williams connection: Edgar Wright would direct the famous singer-songwriter in one of his other roles as an actor, in Baby Driver, in a counter-type role as an arms dealer. Still one of the more original pieces of Edgar Wright's work, where he uses his inspirations, in this case driver movies, and music videos, to blend into a new whole. Baby Driver is about a getaway driver who motivates his turns and brakes by listening to the right music at the right time. Every other car chase plays like a musical sequence, where the beat of the song is literally the driving force. It is the most original of all of Wright's ideas, but its origin is... in one of his music videos. Mint Royale's Blue Song (see finally below) stars Noel Fielding as a getaway driver, who bides his time listening to music, and reacting both to the beats and his environments by using his car as a prop. There are no big chases this time around, but the idea is the same. It's a small, humble origin for a big budget blockbuster. Like the films he has loved before, that have seeds in them for Wright's original spin on them, this one time the seed for his feature was one of his own music videos. Now I just really want to see what a feature film version of Beck's Colors would look like.