Eighteen great animated music videos

Amanita Design (creator of Samorost) does it all -- I haven't yet had the opportunity to link to the absolutely beautiful music video they created for Under Byen - "Plantage". The visual style will feel very familiar to fans of Samorost.







I adore this video. The song is "Remind Me/So Easy" by Norwegian duo Röyksopp, and the animation is a strange and wonderful video by French design studio H5 showing a day in the life of a London office worker as told entirely through infographics, from the features of the alarm clock that wakes her up and where her sewage goes after she flushes to dancing pie charts and stock quotes at the office to stats on pints of beer consumed across the country at the end of the workday. Though the style is deceptively simple, the system is bogglingly complex, revealing the amazingly intricate workings of modern life as we move through it in almost total oblivion.
Via Le territoire des sens.






"The Child" by Alex Gopher is another video created by H5 in 1999. In this one, the entire story is acted out by animated blocks of typography. Very cool.





Like those? More music videos by H5:
Darkel - At the End of the Sky (2006)
Étienne Daho - "Retour à toi" (2003)
Goldfrapp - "Twist" (2003)
Massive Attack - "Special Cases" (2003)
Sinema - "In My Eyes" (2002)
Wuz (Alex Gopher and Demon) - "Use Me" (2002)
Playgroup - "Number One" (2001)
Super Furry Animals - "Juxtaposed With U" (2001)

Steampunk Daedalus and Icarus is a steampunk reimagining of the Greek myth in a sleek woodcut-slideshow style by David Brunell Brutman, creator of the also steampunk-themed illustrated tale The Æthereal Adventures of Emma Verne. The song used in the video is Michael Andrews - "Mad World".
Via Brass Goggles.





Illustrator and animator Clemens Habicht has a very nice portfolio of music videos, most done in a loose, freewheeling collage style. Try the freaky, funny Motor - "Din10", the dreamier, equally expressive Sia - "Numb", or the more minimalist, delicate Lucine ICL - "Seemingly".





In illustrator and animator Joel Trussell's high-energy cartoon world, femme fatales pull off daring heists in spaceborne manta rays with robot owls, scary nurses chase furry woodland animals on railcars, and viking ships do battle by electric guitar. Wild, wacky stuff. The music videos in question are Atomic Swindlers - "Float (my electric stargirl)", Kid 606 - "The Illness", and Jason Forrest - "War Photographer".

Commercial Theatre

"Naturally Juicy", a French Orangina ad.
Via OZOUX.COM.





Trembled Blossoms
Via io9.






That classic Sony Bravia spot with the bouncy balls, featuring the song "Heartbeats" by Jose Gonzalez.





And another Sony spot, this one flooding a city with soap suds.
Via 30gms.

Game review: Dark Fall: The Journal

Dark Fall: The Journal, created in 2003 by XXv Productions (now a part of Darkling Room) and published by The Adventure Company, is a superb example of what a spooky horror game should be. It doesn't rely on gratuitous gore or cheap scares, which most of us are desensitized to by now anyway, but settles instead for a low-key atmosphere of unease. Its ghosts project an aura of melancholy rather than menace, which turns out to be far more affecting.

Your search takes place in the old Dowerton Hotel, which seems to have arrived straight from the 1940's with its contents, and its secrets, barely disturbed. Watched by its ghosts, you must try to discover both what happened eighty years ago, to the people who once inhabited this hotel, and just a few days ago, when three more people disappeared -- your brother, and a pair of ghost hunters who were investigating the haunted hotel.

The majority of your task involves information-gathering, studying the documents and artifacts you find and piecing together the stories of the ghosts' lives and their last days at the hotel. It involves a lot of wandering, backtracking, poking through drawers and shuffling through papers, and sometimes, pausing to listen to voices from the past. It's quiet, slow work, and it's all about absorbing and understanding the place. You may get used to the voices whispering in your ear, but you never feel quite comfortable.

Game review: Return to Mysterious Island

We have a lot to thank Jules Verne's 1874 L'Île mystérieuse (The Mysterious Island) for. In addition to being a major inspiration, and also the source of the name, for Myst, it is also the basis for the excellent 2004 adventure game Return to Mysterious Island by Kheops Studio, published by The Adventure Company.

Mysterious and quite lovely.

In the tradition of The Longest Journey, Syberia, and that lesser Vernian adventure Journey to the Center of the Earth, Return to Mysterious Island features a plucky young heroine far from home. Her name is Mina, and she's a resourceful sailor shipwrecked on what turns out to be the Lincoln Island of Verne's novel, which was not destroyed as in the book but only hidden from the world.

Return is fairly short and limited in scope, taking place entirely in a few areas of the small island, and the production values are modest. It is a shining example of near-perfection achieved on a small scale. To advance the action, for instance, where most developers would be tempted to insert a clunky, awkwardly-animated cutscene, Kheops gets the job done very simply and effectively with still sketches and sound effects. The game even includes a viewer for going back to look at the drawings and watercolors you are rewarded with for successful completion of actions. The artwork does more to add character and atmosphere to the game than a cutscene ever could.

Comic-book style panels tell the story.

And the atmosphere in Return to Mysterious Island is generally great. The music is very pleasant, and stayed with me long after I'd finished the game, but many locations stand on their own with nothing but ambient environmental effects. The visuals are nothing spectacular but up to par for 2004, and the island vistas are quite attractive.

One of the really nice aspects of this game is the gameplay itself. With a few exceptions, like door-lock puzzles near the end, the puzzles are almost entirely inventory-based. But wait, don't go yet. This game brings inventory puzzles to a whole new level, even introducing a unique and handy interface for collecting, sorting, examining and combining items. And while you pick up everything that isn't nailed down, you won't end up with a bunch of random objects to be used in illogical, unforseeable ways; you'll have a lot of basic equipment and natural resources that Mina can use her apparently firm grasp of chemistry, botany, and primitive technology to assemble into an array of useful tools and compounds. If you have some familiarity with those fields, too, you should do well. If not, just keep trying different item combinations until Mina adds them to the "assembly" field where you can store works in progress, which will show empty slots for however many items are still missing to create whatever she has in mind. (That makes a battery? Sometimes it's a surprise all the way to the end.) There are two more great aspects to Return's innovative inventory puzzles: created items can often be taken apart so that the components are reusable, and, best of all, there are multiple solutions. Different components can often be combined to create the same item. A length of vine and a short rope might be interchangeable. Either sticks or a flammable fungus can be used as kindling. Any one of several weapons might do the trick, or you could try another tack entirely. The open-endedness makes things a lot more logical, and saves you from banging your head over that one combination you just didn't think of, when you thought of three others that would work just as well.

The multi-tabbed inventory system is very handy.

In addition to the Robinson Crusoe/Gilligan's Island fire-starting and coconut-shell radio stuff, you also get to rummage through the old notes, slides and maps revealing the history of the island, fight robots (there are some action sequences and you can even die, but the game fortunately lets you retry indefinitely and there's nothing to lose), meet a ghost, recruit an animal companion (but a generally inoffensive and occasionally even cute one, so I didn't mind), and eventually even enter the Nautilus itself, where you can admire a gallery of artifacts and curiosities and face a challenging quiz testing your knowledge of ancient cultures, science, and oceanography. I got a particular kick out of that part, which was right up my alley. It struck me then that Return is an especially literate game that rewards you for a bit of smarts, common sense, and even book learning when it comes to Chinese pottery, marine fauna, or the properties of sulfur.

Inside a cabinet of wonders.

In short, I loved and was highly impressed by this game, which has a lot of brilliant elements and essentially no major drawbacks that I could see. It's a small, tight, well-crafted adventure game with smooth mechanics and a compelling story, and I can recommend it without reservation.

Where to get it: Return to Mysterious Island is available from Amazon, and it is also playable on GameTap.

Where to get help: GameBoomers has an excellent walkthrough.