In the previous episode of the Anime Explorations podcast, I mentioned that this month’s episode is going to include some discussion of Anime Music Videos, in memoriam of the creator of the medium, James Kaposztas, passing away this past year. I had put together a playlist and had some notes on each of the videos, so in advance of the episode, it’s only appropriate to embed it here, along with my comments on each video selection.
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- All You Need is Love: First anime music video, was edited on VHS and debuted at a science fiction convention in 1982. All of the footage used was from Space Battleship Yamato/Star Blazers.
- Hair: The *second* Anime Music Video, similarly edited on VHS and also debuted at a science fiction convention, featuring a wider array of then-contemporary anime series.
- Engel: Credited as one of the first successful lip-sync AMVs, edited by Kevin Caldwell, and also we’re still editing direct to VHS. This isn’t actually the original version – the original version used the German version of Engel by Rammstein, and isn’t on YouTube at the moment. It is on DailyMotion however (https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x35jhh2) – The reason for using the German version is the character syncing with the vocals, Asuka Soryu Langley (from Neon Genesis Evangelion) is half-German.
- Matthew Sweet – Girlfriend: This is something of an instance of the concept of the AMV slipping into the mainstream – with the music video for a single off of Matthew Sweet’s album of the same name editing footage from the Space Adventure Cobra anime, with Sweet performing on top of it, with that footage playing a more prominent role than, say, the footage in Michael & Janet Jackson’s Scream video (where the musical performance plays a more prominent role), and the video for Brian May’s Star Fleet (where May has written lyrics for the UK theme song for X-Bomber, and is using footage from the show among with that cover of the theme song).
- “Tainted Donuts”: Considered to the first Fanfic AMV – crossing over Cowboy Bebop and Trigun, showing some of the ability to use AMV as a medium to tell new stories.
- Bubblegum Crisis/Streets of Fire Trailer: One of the things that came out of the widespread adoption of DVDs as a media for watching movies (and with it the cracking of DVD copy protection), was the ability to rip movie trailers, and with them their audio for use in AMVs – there was a certain degree of an ability to do this before using VHS Trailer Tape from video stores for a similar role, but this made this much easier to do. This lead to an entire genre of AMVs based around combining audio from movie trailers with video from various anime series or films (long before it was a popular meme to create recut movie trailers to change how a film is presented. I went with this particular video due to the fact that the film Streets of Fire was far more popular in Japan than it was in the US, and several anime works would pay reference to it – in particular, the opening musical number to the first episode of Bubblegum Crisis (“Konya Wa Hurricane”) was cut to match the rhythms of the opening musical number from Streets of Fire (“Nowhere Fast”).
- “Ship Happens”: The introduction of Adobe AfterEffects allowing for new ways of combining footage and clips to fit thematically with the song, even if they don’t reflect actual fanfic ships (the video is edited to have characters from totally unrelated shows seemingly in a ship with each other)
- “Clover Dreams”: With AfterEffects also came the ability to move beyond just doing Anime, but also to incorporate manga into videos, such as this one focusing on the manga Clover from Japanese women’s manga collective CLAMP.
- New Divide: The rise of the ability to swap videos online, both through peer-to-peer services and through YouTube coincided with the early albums by Linkin Park, to the point that Mike Shinoda has mentioned in interviews that AMVs have played a definite mark on the band’s ultimate rise. I had originally thought about using a video that used Session, off of Meteora, but I decided to use something that featured the late Chester Bennington’s vocals instead.
The last 3 are getting into what I’d call the “State of the Art” for AMVs at the moment. - “Uma Gait”: Jury Winner from Otakon 2023, featuring footage from the Uma Musume anime franchise (anime series based on a mobile game that has anthropomorphic personifications of famous racehorses as horse girls, who are also idol singers)
- “Love is not a Victory March”: Best Retro Winner from Kumoricon 2022 – featuring footage from Revolutionary Girl Utena.
- “One Step at a Time”: Best Fun & Play from Anime Expo 2022.
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