So the day before yesterday, two animated music videos popped up on Twitter at about the same time for me.
“Freak of the Week” by Freak Kitchen, animated after a $140k Kickstarter campaign by the dude who draws ‘Blacksad’ and a few other Disney feature veterans…
…and “Ghost” by the Mystery Skulls, animated for an unknown budget by “Mysteryben27” and a few other folks.
A hell of a lot more people were retweeting the Mystery Skulls video than the Freak Kitchen video, myself included.
I find myself thinking about why this is. Because clearly the Freak Kitchen video is “better” animation, right? There’s a lot more attention paid to any individual frame, the motion is beautiful and fluid. The Mystery Skulls video’s animation is often crude even by the standards of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons it borrows from. (The individual drawings are pretty good – but there are so few of them!)
And yet. The Freak Kitchen video is just “hey here are some caricatures of the band rocking out”. It switches back and forth between animation and stock footage; in terms of narrative, it’s little more than a standard video made with lots of shots of the band playing. Nothing really happens – there’s no tension built up about whether or not these leering musicians will be destroyed by the molten metal involved in their cartoon stage presentation. The Mystery Skulls video, on the other hand, is presented in a consistent style from start to finish, and has a narrative. It’s very much intertwined with the music – everything bounces to the beat, its action riffs off the lyrics – but it adds a whole new layer of story to the song. Halfway through when it hops into a flashback and gives you a reason this skeleton dude is pursuing these Scooby-Doo parodies, it may even become somewhat emotionally affecting. The Freak Kitchen video never reaches for that; at the end, all it has to sum itself up with is ‘the band leader was imagining a really cool stage show and now they go play for real’.
On the micro level of frame-by-frame animation, the Freak Kitchen video is far superior. Juanjo and his crew are into drawing these dudes rocking out, this animation has really been loved on. But on a macro level, the Mystery Skulls video is the one that wins, with its attention paid to story, character, and the occasional gag.
As always: pour all the care and craft you like into a drawing, but ultimately, when dealing with any form of art in sequence, it’s story that carries the day.