Rage Gets Animated (DVD)

Hot on the heels of the 20 Years of Rage compilation comes another video clip feast from the ABC. Focusing on primarily animated examples from the world of music videos, it also happily has a distinctive Australian slant, which is great to see as there are some excellent Aussie directors and artists out there working in the medium.

It also covers the gambit of genres, and even includes a few retro pieces such as Ah-ah’s classic Take On Me and the RHCP’s Behind the Sun. On this angle I would have really loved to have seen New Order’s Blue Monday clip included as its certainly seminal in the field.

Kicking off with the great James Hackett directed Horror with Eyeballs by the Dissociatives, featuring a very unique animation style that really caught peoples attention when it was released. Another early worthy inclusion is the quirky 2D animation for Josh Pyke’s Middle of the Hill video, definitely a good match of sound and form. Other highlights include the excellent Jodas Odell directed clip for Audio Bullys’ Bang Bang, which took an entire graphic design movement and summed it up in one video clip.

There were clips on here that totally passed me by no longer being a regular Rage viewer so it was great to see such interesting and diverse clips that without this compilation I would have missed all together, such as the knitted madness of Steriogram’s Walkie Talkie Man or Death Cab for Cutie’s stop motion goodness in Crooked Teeth.

Also a pleasure to watch were the Monty Python style madness of Badly Drawn Boy’s You Were Right which pushes the light hearted nature of the song into the visual spectrum, and the arty, haunting beauty of Lee Lennox’s clip for The Presets’ Girl and the Sea. It proves that not all dance music videos have to be flash, shiny examples of modernity.

With all the good stuff on there I can’t see why you would include (besides for “trendy value”) a clip like the Klaxons’ Atlantis to Interzone which is barely animated, and leave off the wonderful White Stripes and Michel Gondry collaboration, Fell in Love With a Girl.

You also get the obligatory low res 80s fad clips of MIA’s Boyz and to a lesser extent Gossip’s Standing in the Way of Control. It’s a great tune, but the video leaves a lot to be desired. For true kitsch Regurgitator’s Black Bugs is here in all its homemade 3D glory, thanks to Quan Yeoman’s home PC and some time off between tours I’m sure.

All up a good collection, if a little Aussie-centric – but this was to be expected from Rage/ABC/JJJ. Although how they could overlook Paula Adbul’s Opposites Attract is amazing. Maybe they’re saving animated MC cats for the second volume…