Not all music videos contain real people. A lot rely on the work on talented illustrators and animators to create colorful and detailed worlds to entertain us and often tell a story. The digital age has brought countless animated videos but I’m just going to talk about a few that stand out to me.

The video for Feel Good Inc. by the Gorillaz is one I’ve grown up with seeing on the TV and I’ve always thought it was fantastic. Acording to the band its inspired by Japanese animations with the colors, textures and tones. I love the world they create starting with sky high tower above a futuristic industrilized city.

The 1985 video for Dire Straits Money for Nothing combines real-life footage and animation to create a ground breaking video. It’s actually widely accepted as the first depiction of humans as CGI characters in pop culture. It may not look like much now but it really was the first of its kind and it still retains that charm for me. On top of switching from real-life to animation, the stage footage of the dire straights performing is partially rotoscoped-animation with bright neon-colors matching the record sleve which I thought was very 80s.

It’d be a crime to talk about animated music videos without mentioning the techno-wizards Daft Punk. They take things a step further by creating an entire feature animation acompinied by their songs with the 2003 Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. Each track from their album Discovery has an animated episode in the story of the abduction and then rescue of an interstella pop band. While technically a film, the sci-fi follows a common music video convention of no dialogue and minimum sound effects. Its a perfect example how well music can be combined with animation to convey a compelling story.

Here’s one of the hit songs One More Time which was also a standalone music video