{"id":513590,"date":"2026-03-04T11:03:20","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T11:03:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/513590\/"},"modified":"2026-03-04T11:03:20","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T11:03:20","slug":"gorillaz-revive-midcentury-animation-techniques-in-new-video","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/513590\/","title":{"rendered":"Gorillaz Revive Midcentury Animation Techniques In New Video"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Perhaps more than ever, audiences now crave real texture in their imagery, and the artists behind some animated music videos are catching on. With the general sense that tangible feeling in moving-image art has gradually been left behind with the advent of digital (and more recently, generated images spat out by gen AI), the handmade qualities of the short The Mountain, The Moon Cave and the Sad God from Gorillaz and the artists at London\u2019s The Line studio have immediately captured people\u2019s wistfulness for animation you can touch. (You can also see this reflected in the nostalgic music video for \u201cSpirit Jumper\u201d by spktra<\/a>, which was similarly studious in how it replicated the textures of cel animation through digital methods.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The new video, named for three songs off the band\u2019s new album The Mountain, was produced through a fascinating hybrid workflow of actual paintings with digital touch-ups, physical props and lighting tricks, optical effects on film, and hand-drawn animation created digitally. All of these analog and digital layers combine into a piece that feels authentically textured.<\/p>\n

Co-directors (and co-founders of The Line) Max Taylor and Tim McCourt were enthusiastic about unspooling each individual component that would add up to the look of a Western animated film from the 1950s and \u201960s. \u201cFrom the start to the finish, we recreated every step of the process,\u201d Taylor says, \u201cmirroring how it would have been done in the analog way, so the final effect is that you feel that it\u2019s something tangible and real.\u201d The effect, as the directors put it, is additive \u2014 each small detail building into something holistic despite the variety of methods.<\/p>\n

This began with the work of the film\u2019s other co-director and Gorillaz co-founder, artist Jamie Hewlett, who wanted to evoke a classical era of animation and reached out to the team to tackle the challenge. Hewlett worked on storyboards and animatics, with the team at The Line doing \u201ca due diligence pass\u201d before moving into animation.<\/p>\n

Building on that foundation, the team sought to recreate the texture of that era of filmmaking piece by piece, going to great lengths to do so. \u201cThe whole film was very much an exercise in paying homage to something \u2014 researching all the references for how we could recreate that specific feeling,\u201d Taylor says.<\/p>\n

One example was emulating how a cel was painted and then Xeroxed \u2014 a process popularized by Disney films in the late 1950s and \u201960s. \u201cOne thing we liked about the era was when they started Xeroxing or photocopying onto cel, which gave the quality of the cel a different look,\u201d McCourt says, noting how it complemented Hewlett\u2019s style. \u201cHe tends to have a bit more of a clean line now, but if you look at Demon Days and Plastic Beach, you have this lovely pencil line work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Taylor adds, \u201cWe were taking our cleanup with a pencil line, treating that to make sure it felt like it had been Xeroxed, and then adding colors with textures and boils, subtle drop shadows. It\u2019s about minor details adding up \u2014 you can\u2019t really pick one out and say, \u2018Oh, I can see that\u2019s an effect.\u2019\u201d The team\u2019s research was thorough. Though the animation wasn\u2019t done on cels, they created a few for reference. (\u201cEven just trying to get [the frame] printed onto the cel was difficult,\u201d McCourt admits, describing a complex struggle with Sellotape.)<\/p>\n

To replicate the grain of celluloid film, they used scans of actual film overlaid onto the shots. \u201cWithin the film there are lots of optical effects where we filmed live-action components,\u201d Taylor says. \u201cWe then emulated the double exposures they would have done back in the day on film. As far as the grain, dirt, and noise, it\u2019s scanned film \u2014 blank film overlaid to give the final image that real film texture.\u201d McCourt adds that they introduced gate weave \u2014 the characteristic wobble of film as it runs through a projector \u2014 to reinforce the effect.<\/p>\n

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Live-action footage and physical props also played a significant role. Some inspiration came from Hermann Schultheis, an artist on Fantasia, with the directors citing his collected notes in The Lost Notebook as a reference point.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a really fascinating book. It gave us good insight into some of the practical optical effects they did,\u201d Taylor says. \u201cFor example, in the film, we have a waterfall. They would have filmed smoke in water, flipped it upside down, and double-exposed it over the painted waterfall to get that sense of water spray.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were other practical props as well, including the fairytale book that opens the short. \u201cWe worked with one of the last remaining bookbinders in London that\u2019s actually down the road from our studio, called Wyvern Bindery,\u201d Taylor says. The book was filmed and rigged with piano wire so the pages appear to open magically. \u201cWe deliberately didn\u2019t paint out the piano wire \u2014 you can see it \u2014 because I don\u2019t think they would have had that kind of touch-up or postproduction facility back then,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n

Even seemingly minor elements involved hands-on experimentation. For the glowing gold mountain logo that appears later in the film, the team cut the logo out of a black acrylic sheet and rigged an elaborate rostrum camera setup, pumping smoke beneath the sheet. The reveal was achieved by pouring black sand into the crack to cover the logo, then playing the footage in reverse. \u201cEven the glow is literally someone cranking the light temperature up in the room \u2014 it\u2019s a real optical glow,\u201d McCourt says. \u201cYou get bits of sand stuck, imperfections where the light shifts and creates these God rays. Or hotspots where the light hits differently. All of that is so hard to replicate digitally \u2014 and it just wouldn\u2019t look as cool.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The Earth shot was similarly achieved optically. \u201cIt\u2019s something they did in old sci-fi movies \u2014 take a big polystyrene sphere covered in plaster, then project a painting of the Earth onto it,\u201d Taylor explains. \u201cIn Jamie\u2019s animatic, he wanted the sun rising from behind, revealing this giant planet. So the light poking around the Earth is just a light on a C-stand that we tilt toward the camera. You get a natural lens flare and a feeling of sunrise.\u201d The shadow revealing the planet? Simply Taylor is moving his hand in front of the projector.<\/p>\n

These creative solutions emerged from self-imposed restrictions, guided by the available technology of the period they were emulating. As McCourt puts it: \u201cOur philosophy was that if they couldn\u2019t have done something in that era, then we didn\u2019t do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

That meant scaling back contemporary conveniences. \u201cMultiplane was the most expensive type of camera work you could do back then. Now it\u2019s cheap \u2014 you put a bunch of layers in After Effects and move them, and every shot could have multiplane if you wanted,\u201d McCourt says. Instead, they limited themselves to a plausible number of layers. \u201cWe were thinking about where productions would have spent that money. They might only have been able to afford six layers \u2014 or three \u2014 even though we could have had 50. That approach affected the directorial style as much as the practical side.\u201d Many shots use only two to four layers, and camera movement remains largely linear and restrained.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, subtracting modern tools didn\u2019t result in minimalism but in inventive complication. Painted backgrounds were another example. Taylor notes that the era balanced impressionism and detail to suggest depth of field, with foliage appearing as clusters of vague dots.<\/p>\n

\"TheHand-painted background from \u2018The Mountain, The Moon Cave and the Sad God\u2019
\n\"\"Hand-painted background from \u2018The Mountain, The Moon Cave and the Sad God\u2019
\n\"TheHand-painted background from \u2018The Mountain, The Moon Cave and the Sad God\u2019
\n\"TheHand-painted background from \u2018The Mountain, The Moon Cave and the Sad God\u2019<\/p>\n

Working with art director Eido Hayashi, they found a compromise between authenticity and production practicality. \u201cWhen you\u2019re having lots of input, it\u2019s very hard if you have to repaint a whole background,\u201d Taylor says.<\/p>\n

The solution: paint the base by hand, then add detail digitally in Photoshop. \u201cWhat\u2019s beautiful is you get something that\u2019s really hard to emulate digitally \u2014 the way blue and green paints mix in water on the page,\u201d Taylor says. Painter Arnaud Tribout handled many of the base paintings. \u201cHe\u2019d create these impressionistic backdrops, then we\u2019d scan them, split them into layers, and finesse the detail digitally,\u201d Taylor explains.<\/p>\n

\"The \"The \"The \"The \"The<\/p>\n

As for the characters, the team was already familiar with Gorillaz\u2019s specificities. \u201cWe knew how particular Jamie is about the characters being on model. That means you have to be very direct with movement and performance,\u201d McCourt says. \u201cBut we were going for something more classical Western 2D animation, which needs more performance and fluidity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rather than rotoscoping, the directors relied on reference footage. Taylor\u2019s children served as a partial reference for Noodle in a Jungle Book\u2013esque flashback sequence.<\/p>\n

\"The \"The \"The<\/p>\n

The video\u2019s most stylistically divergent moment comes in the Moon Cave sequence, directed by animator Johnatan Djob Nkondo. As the characters enter a cavern, the lush backgrounds drop away, replaced by stark black and luminous blue figures in a hallucinatory abstraction.<\/p>\n

\"The \"The \"The<\/p>\n

\u201cWe needed to find ways of doing interesting work more economically,\u201d McCourt says. \u201cSo we pitched this abstract section as a homage to early feature films that would enter surrealist moments. It ticks a few boxes and let us allocate budget elsewhere since it didn\u2019t require backgrounds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nkondo was given considerable freedom. \u201cWith the exception of the Gorillaz character animation, he animated everything himself,\u201d McCourt says. \u201cHe storyboarded it, animated every additional character, even cleaned it up. Every pass would come back with some new wild idea.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, all these components cohere into something greater than the sum of their parts. The video\u2019s reception underscores a hunger for tactile, materially grounded animation \u2014 for the quirks of traditional processes and the intangible feeling that comes with them. It\u2019s a reminder that sometimes the most forward-looking creative gesture is looking backward \u2014 and doing so with rigor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Perhaps more than ever, audiences now crave real texture in their imagery, and the artists behind some animated…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":513591,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-513590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/513591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}