Masanobu Hiraoka - related work summary

Animator Masanobu Hiraoka is currently one of my favourite creators. He is an animator, director and visual artist from Japan, and what drew me to his work was the music video that he did for rapper Anderson Paak, ‘Flying Lotus.’

The music video depicts a rocket in space crashing on an alien planet, and the lone spaceman crossing the vast expanse of an unknown world till he comes across a robot. The robot begins rapping, and the spaceman starts seeing strange psychedelic visions of birds and organisms. Then, his body begins to expand and mutate grotesquely, his insides bursting out in fluid movements and his body grows into a huge Cronenberg looking tree. The music video ends with a pan out shit of the planet surface covered in more mutant trees.

Music video is a fantastic platform for animation because it allows for so much interpretation and creative freedom. In this case, the bizarre narrative is weird and disturbing, but interpreted so beautifully and the sombre feeling that it leaves you with is a credit to the artist and their skill.

Thematically, I am drawn to this music video because the visual language of the spaceman mutating and transforming is so elegant and fluid, and yet it is really disturbing and grotesque at the same time. It feels like an homage to the 1998 film Akira, which has one of the most iconic animated transformation sequences put to film. Something that I want to explore is animating freely in this way and exploring materials, movement and physicality of objects and characters.