Airy Me

This is an AMV by Cuushe... And no spoilers.

This music video is really something... The video itself and the song goes beautifully hand in hand, enhancing one another. But the name of the music genre is unknown to me but you can somewhat call it dream pop, a very calming but somewhat experimentally, I feel like that it has a "björk" vibe to it.

The music video is very artistically done with a really beautiful fluent but unique animationstyle, the story of the music video is also artistic but not the completely mindfuck like, there is a story to it and I feel like this needs ... to be rewatch to get all the lovely details of a more complex story. :)

A very calming but intriguing AMV for those who wants to relax and let the mind philosophical fly away ^^

Airy Me demonstrates how thematic mystery and individual interpretation can wildly affect a person's opinion on a single video. It's a story that is intentionally abstract and vague, allowing the viewer to come to their own conclusion to the story and its meaning. "A test subject is administered daily medication by a nurse in a ward where mysterious medical experiments take place. One day, when the nurse presses the switch of the test subject, they successfully transform into a chimera." (Japan Media Arts Festival) Airy Me is an animated music video inspired by Cuushe's 2009 song of the same name. The distinctive music blends masterfully ... with the animation, as the line-art shifts and changes in time with the song. The soft, wistful and sometimes pained vocals of the music adds greatly to the entirety of the video. The character design and animation are a blend of cute blobs, contrasted with the visceral contortion and body horror that appears later half of the video.

Yoko Kuno is a graduate of the Department of Graphic Design at Tama Art University. While a student, she created installations, sculptures, and animated works centring on themes of young girls, animals, delinquents and other motifs with an undefinable graphic quality. Yoko created Airy Me from 3,000 still images drawn over almost two years. Images were drawn with coloured pencils and crayon and edited with Adobe Photoshop and After Effects. It received the Animation Division New Face Award at the 17th Japan Media Arts Festival. Yoko is also known for her commercial work as a Rotoscope Animation Director on the film The Case of Hana & Alice. Also as a storyboarder, key animator (ED) and episode director (EP11) for Land of the Lustrous.

I love watching Airy Me, and every time I do, I notice something visually different. I always leave with a warm mellow feeling. It's a feeling that I can't describe, I have only ever felt it while watching this video. It's short, so you should watch Airy Me if you want to see something amazing, emotional, and different in tone from many of the other animated music videos out there. Airy Me is a perfect blend of a creepy/cutesy aesthetic that I would like to see more of in animation.

(Lyrics)
Unable to sit still, I practice those steps
One, two, three, one, two, three
Unable to settle down, my head is now in Madagascar
Becoming transparent, I want to melt into the night
Tonight like air: Airy me
I don't want to be anything
The town's lights, like marble lights, assault me
I climb Tokyo Tower late at night, twelve

I become suffused into that red
Cover you in syrup, I want to eat you
And then, we're flying off, inside a crazy dream
The distant landscape we just saw, I want to melt into it
I don't want to feel anything
But when you laugh, and that puts a stopper on me
But, you know, the world just turns so fast
Like you always do, laugh for me
If you don't at least do that, I'll soon
I feel I'll disappear

This came to me via a recommendation of a friend/acquaintance after a short chat about 00:08 because of the similarity of their art style. Both are emotionally driven, hand drawn pencil ellipsoidal animations with a series of repetitions eventually coming to a kind of explanatory crescendo. The difference for me was that the narrative of 'Airy Me' has clarity that 00:08 was lacking.

The video was directed by visionary Yoko Kuno, an animator known for a highly stylized animation style of schoolyard drawings and large, feminine, soft eyes created the video using 3000 individual hand-drawn illustrations and utilized the look of a child drawing pictures to ... create a feeling of innocence. The colours are subtle and hazy, just like in a dream and the incorporation of butterflies as a method of scene transition was a nice way of connecting the artist's, Cuushe's newest album, titled "Butterfly Case", with the ideology of childhood fantasies.

The music for this video is shoegaze, which is very otherworldly and ambient. A bit like Aphex Twin, Beach House, or Black Tambourine with the vocals of Sigur Rós. Interestingly, the director decided to go with a fast paced animation style for the drawings rather than a more lackadaisical one that would have better matched the mood of the music.

In juxtaposition to the airy musical stylings, the action of the first 1:06 of the video happens very fast. Trying to keep up with it reminded me of the first time I watched Yojōhan Shinwa Taikei (The Tatami Galaxy) with its speedy subtitles and speech patterns - it was difficult to keep up with it and I had to watch it twice in a row because I missed crucial elements from my first viewing. Oddly enough, the fast pace matches with the slower, transcendental one gave me the feeling of hurried panic - as though I was missing something fundamentally crucial that I could never catch up to. The next part is slower in pace, but the feeling of cruciality remains as the plot begins to unveil itself and fold back to the start. Suddenly the fast pace part makes more sense and we are left with a strong emotional charge.

The story reminded me a bit of Ōtomo Katsuhiro's “Akira” or Osamu Tezuka. I don’t want to spoil it, but you’ll see what I mean when you watch the video. There is a hopelessness that surrounds it, while keeping its audience entranced. The only real flaw I sensed was the lack of any connection I felt to it. While I found the content fascinating to think about, I would not necessarily call it memorable. I suspect I have more of a connection to the narrative of Foster the People’s “Don’t Stop”, but at least it is interesting while it lasts.