Generic Research - Close Textual Analysis - Music Video #2

 Close Textual Analysis - Music Video #2 - Take on Me, a-ha

This music video is a combination of video recordings and pencil-sketched rotoscoping animation. The narrative is simple - a girl is sitting alone in a cafe reading a comic. The comic comes to life as a hand reaches out to take her into the cartoon - where the narrative then tur
ns to a love story. They get chased out by the other characters, ad the lead singer (one of the cartoons) comes into the real world with the girl, and the video ends. Throughout the video there is a theme of the "love conquers all" stereotype, a popular theme within the genre - and the narrative itself is reminiscent of a comic book narrative, with a clearly defined beginning, middle and end - a hero and an enemy who are somewhat caricatured.

This video is heavily narrative based, providing a sense of escapism for the audience. It is in accordance to Andrew Goodwin's music video theory, as there are multiple close ups of the main artist/singer's face. There is a clear representation of lyrics, but rather than having a literal representation, the director has decided to use more direct means of addressing the audience, creating a self-contained story.  The video is a hybrid of linear narrative and performance, but focusing heavily on the romance narrative elements. The audience of this video are the observers, who get to experience the romance unfold, and the target audience would be male and female equally due to its themes of love- primarily middle classed young adults, who would come under the Aspirer psychometric.

There is a clear opposition in mise-en-scene throughout this video, with a stark contrast between the naturalistic, beige and brown tones of the cafe, and the contrasting black and white of the pencil sketches. This creates a literal escape from reality - the neutral colours give an impression of a mundane setting, whereas the drawing is extremely visually impressive.

Costumes are casual, yet stylish, and befitting of the New Wave genre, and helps accentuate the importance of the animation elements-  they are not presenting themselves as particularly flashy. This is something I wish to achieve in my video, to not overshadow my animation elements.

The way performance and narrative are hybridised in this video, as well as the style itself of cartoon interacting with reality - is very influential to how I wish to approach making my music video. Obviously, my scale is much smaller, and I will be avoiding the rotoscoping process as it is much more complex than what I can achieve, but it creates an exciting mise-en-scene that I wish to reproduce in my video, and I may choose to make intertextual links to this video (for example, my main character could look through a comic-book, similar to the one in the video) as it is an extremely influential video in the world of animation and music.