Gorillaz Revive Classic Midcentury Animation Styles in New Video
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Fake Xerox And Real Piano Wire: How Gorillaz Went Old School For ‘The Mountain’
By Kambole Campbell (https://www.cartoonbrew.com/author/kambole-campbell) | |
In an era where audiences increasingly yearn for tangible texture in visual art, a wave of music videos crafted with hands-on details is catching their eye. As digital technology proliferates and generative AI images become more common, there’s a growing nostalgia for animation that feels touchable. This longing is evident in Gorillaz’s short The Mountain, along with The Line studio in London’s work on The Moon Cave and Sad God, which all evoke the warmth of traditional, tactile animation. You can also see a similar impulse in spktra’s Spirit Jumper music video, which deliberately mirrors cel animation textures through digital techniques.
The latest Gorillaz video—titting three tracks from the new album The Mountain—emerges from a captivating hybrid workflow. It blends actual paintings with digital retouching, physical props and lighting tricks, optical effects filmed on real film, and hand-drawn animation that’s created digitally. All of these analog and digital layers converge to deliver a piece that feels richly textured and authentic.
Co-directors and The Line’s founders Max Taylor and Tim McCourt enthusiastically unpack how each element contributes to a look reminiscent of a 1950s–1960s Western animation. “From start to finish, we recreated every step of the process,” Taylor explains, noting that they mirrored the classic analog methods so the end result feels tangible and real. The effect is additive—tiny details accumulate to form a coherent whole, despite the mix of techniques.
The project began with Gorillaz co-founder and artist Jamie Hewlett, who wanted to conjure the animation style of a bygone era and enlisted the team’s help. Hewlett contributed storyboards and animatics, while The Line conducted a thorough preliminary review before full animation began.
Building from that base, the team strove to reproduce the era’s texture piece by piece, going to great lengths to do so. “The entire project was really an exercise in homage,” Taylor says, “researching every reference to recapture that distinctive vibe.”
A key illustration was the method by which a cel was painted and then Xeroxed—a technique popular in Disney films in the late 1950s and 1960s. “What attracted us to that era was the shift to Xerox or photocopy onto cel, which gave the cel’s surface a novel character,” McCourt notes, aligning with Hewlett’s clean-line style. “If you look at Demon Days and Plastic Beach, you’ll spot that pencil-line charm.”
Taylor adds that they cleaned up with a pencil line intended to resemble Xeroxed work, then layered in textures, boils, and subtle drop shadows. The idea was that small, almost imperceptible details collectively create the overall effect. The team conducted extensive research and even produced a few reference cels, acknowledging the challenges—like printing a frame onto a cel—were nontrivial (McCourt).
To imitate the grain of celluloid film, they overlaid scans of actual film onto the footage. “The film itself contains numerous optical effects where we incorporated live-action elements,” Taylor notes, describing how they emulated old-day double exposures. For authenticity, they introduced grain, dirt, and visible noise via scanned blank film overlays, and added gate weave—the characteristic wobble from running film through a projector—to reinforce the look. McCourt emphasizes that such details are difficult to replicate digitally and often look less compelling when generated purely by computer.
Live-action footage and physical props played a substantial role in the production. Inspiration also came from Hermann Schultheis, a Fantasia collaborator, whose notes in The Lost Notebook provided practical optical-effect insights that guided their approach. “That book gave us valuable context on real-world effects once used in film,” says Taylor. He cites a waterfall sequence where smoke in water was filmed, inverted, and double-exposed over a painted waterfall to simulate spray.
Practical props were also a feature, including a fairytale book that opens the short. The team collaborated with Wyvern Bindery, one of London’s last bookbinders, to film and rig the book with piano wire so its pages seem to turn magically. “We deliberately left the piano wire visible because such postproduction refinements wouldn’t have been available back then,” Taylor adds.
Even minor touches involved hands-on experimentation. For the glowing gold mountain logo that appears later, they cut the logo from black acrylic, mounted it on a rostrum camera setup, and circulated smoke beneath the sheet. The reveal was achieved by pouring black sand into the crack to obscure the logo, then playing the footage in reverse. “The glow is literally produced by cranking the light temperature in the room—it's a true optical glow,” McCourt explains. “You also see sand particles and light shifts creating natural god rays and hotspots. Digital replication would not only be less convincing but might miss that tangible edge.”
The Earth shot followed a similar optical path. Taylor describes the classic technique: a large polystyrene sphere coated with plaster, onto which a painting of Earth is projected. Jamie’s animatic envisioned the sun rising behind the planet, with light peeking around the sphere. “The light peeking around the Earth is simply a light on a stand aimed at the camera,” Taylor says, producing a natural lens flare and a sunrise feel. The perceived shadow revealing the planet is achieved by moving a hand in front of the projector.
These solutions grew out of deliberate limitations—an intentional choice to work within the constraints of the era they aimed to emulate. “If the era couldn’t accommodate something, we didn’t do it,” McCourt states.
That philosophy also meant dialing back modern conveniences. Multiplane cameras, though expensive then, are cheap now when we drop multiple layers into After Effects. The team chose a restrained layer count, simulating how productions of the time would allocate funds. “They likely could afford six layers, or three—never fifty,” McCourt notes. This constraint shaped the directing style as well as the practical workflow. Many shots feature just two to four layers, and camera movement remains steady and purposeful.
Rather than embracing minimalism, the team embraced inventive complexity by using painted backgrounds that evoke depth through impressionistic yet detailed touches. Taylor explains that the era balanced suggestion and detail to imply depth, with foliage represented as clusters of soft dots.
With art director Eido Hayashi, the team found a balance between authenticity and production practicality. “When you have lots of input, repainting an entire background can be a challenge,” Taylor observes. The chosen approach: hand-paint the base layer, then add detail digitally in Photoshop. “The result is something that’s genuinely hard to mimic digitally—the way blues and greens mix on paper with water,” Taylor says. Painter Arnaud Tribout created many base paintings, which were scanned, split into layers, and refined digitally to achieve the final look.
Regarding the characters, the team already understood Gorillaz’s idiosyncrasies. “Jamie is very particular about keeping characters on-model, which demands precise movement and performance,” McCourt notes. “But we were aiming for a more traditional Western-style 2D animation, which requires stronger performance and more fluidity.”
Instead of rotoscoping, the directors leaned on reference footage. Taylor even used his own children as partial references for Noodle’s Jungle Book–like memory sequence.
The Moon Cave sequence marks the video’s most visually divergent moment, directed by animator Johnatan Djob Nkondo. As the characters enter a cavern, lush backgrounds vanish, replaced by stark black shapes and luminous blue figures in a surreal, dreamlike world.
To maximize creative yet economical outcomes, Nkondo was given substantial freedom. “Except for Gorillaz’s character animation, he handled most of the work himself—storyboarding, animating extra characters, and even cleaning up,” McCourt explains. Each pass brought fresh, bold ideas.
In the end, all these disparate elements fuse into something greater than the sum of its parts. The response to the video signals a renewed appetite for tactile, materially grounded animation—the charm of traditional methods and the ineffable feeling they convey. It serves as a reminder that sometimes the boldest forward leap is a respectful look backward, pursued with rigor and imagination.
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