Gorillaz, the virtual band created by musician Damon Albarn and comic artist Jamie Hewlett, recently released their ninth album, The Mountain. As part of the release, they also created a beautiful animated video with three of the songs from the album, “The Mountain, the Moon Cave, and the Sad God”.
The final animation is unique because it was produced using a hybrid workflow of traditional (hand-painted) images with digital effects, with the ultimate goal of recreating the feel of Western animated films from over half a century ago. The animation team purposely imposed on themselves some of the same constraints that mid-20th-century animators would have faced, and solved them with the same tricks and techniques. But they also judiciously used modern technology to speed up their workflow, like using Photoshop over hand-painted backgrounds to add fine detail to the background images.
The end result is a superb animation, set to fantastic new music, telling a beautiful visual story. The influence of The Jungle Book is obvious in the first part of the animation, the Moon Cave sequence is an homage to surreal sequences in older animated films, and throughout it all the main characters stay on-model with Jamie Hewlett’s design.
If you want to learn more about the specific techniques and workflow used in the animation, Cartoon Brew wrote a much longer article from interviews with the animators that includes some of the original artwork used in the animation.