"Starlight Brigade"
This review was fast lane comissioned by @krinsbez
"Animesque western cartoon music videos" is a specific and obscure enough thing that you'd think I wouldn't get tossed it at me more than once, but here we are! Unlike with "Interstella 5555" this pair's creative team isn't even partly Japanese. Both were creations of US-based animation studio Knights of the Light Table, whose members cut their teeth at anime-style filmmaking with their work on Netflix's "Castlevania" series.
The songs that these music videos are for are by different bands, but both of them have vocal talent Dan Avidan (aka Danny Sexbang) as an added contributor. I've never seen anything Avidan has been in, as I'd heard mostly negative things about Game Grumps and Ninja Sex Party, but by that same token I have zero positive or negative expectations of the guy. I'm guessing he has some history with the Knights of the Light Table crew, to be collaborating with them repeatedly.
I DID see a good few episodes of the Castlevania anime though, and I quite enjoyed them, so I expect the visual components of these music vids to be good even if nothing else about them is.
Anyway, I intended to cover these in one post, but I ended up having a lot to say and a lot of images to capture for the first one, so I'll make it two posts. Second one will be up tomorrow. The first one, "Starlight Brigade," will be today.
This music video was made in 2019, for a song on TupperWare Remix Party's "Together Through Time" album that came out the year previously. TWRP is a Canadian rock band that did some previous collaboration with Dan Avidan, so that's where at least part of the networking came from.
In another surprising parallel, the YouTube thumbnail for "Starlight Brigade" looks like this:
This has got to be partly inspired by Interstella 5555. If not deliberately shouting it out.
Open on...okay, yeah, they're being pretty damned unapologetic about their influences here...a lustrous night sky, with a little teal-skinned elf girl sitting on her teal-skinned elf father's shoulders and reaching up at a particularly bright star.
The star vanishes from its place in the sky and becomes an unnatural lightning bolt, which shoots around the heavens for a moment before coming in close and reforming itself into a spaceship or something. Energy flashes around it. The background distorts, as if the object is bending light toward itself.
It hovers its reality-warping mass right over the pair of stargazers, as if watching them back through its reflective, polygonal hull. The electronic techno-bass beat starts. The girl reaches both arms for the UFO, and her expression becomes one of loss and sorrow. Then we flash forward to another night, many years later, with that blue elf girl - now an adult - sitting on a pile of junk and staring at the stars again, now wistfully.
I first thought that the UFO had abducted her father or something, from how her expression changed and her later body language suggested loss, but no. A moment later he comes out of the little cottage made of scrap metal behind her, looking older but otherwise no worse for wear - and tries to get her to stop watching the sky and come back inside.
So, no tragedy. She just really, really wanted a closer look at the UFO, and hasn't been able to get it out of her mind in the years since that sighting. Okay then.
Strings and synth add themselves to the music, as well as some (imo) slightly-too-loud vocals, as a mysterious light splits the sky again. The girl looks up in excitement. Her father tries in vain to get her to come back inside and not go chasing aylmao. She gives him a bitter, resentful look, and then goes running away to chase the light over the nearby hills, shutting out her father's protests. As she runs, we see that they're in a little village of similar dwellings, and that most of the other townsfolk are either asleep standing up or engaged in some kind of worship.
Hmm. The fact that everything seems to be made of scrap metal makes me wonder if this may be a village of shipwreckees or castaways, with everyone except the girl having given up hope of rescue. Could be. But then, I'm not sure why she alone would retain hope that passing spaceships might rescue them, if they came from one themselves to begin with.
The lyrics for this part, by the way, are as follows:
“When I look up at the sky, what meets my eyes?
Can I just stand by while the world dies?
A starship idling nearby, is it my time?
I crawl inside and turn the cockpit clockwise, toward the sunrise”
Suggestive, certainly. Going by the lyrics, either they are in fact shipwreckees, or it's just a post-apocalyptic planet with the girl hoping aylmao might help them unfuck their world.
She crosses the hill, and sees that the UFO has come in for a crash landing itself now along a seashore. So much for rescue, then! It's either a different ship from before, or it's reshaped its triangular hull panels into a less pyramidal configuration. Also, if it IS the same ship then it must have come much closer than I realized during that first sighting, because it is not large.
She gets close to it, and sees her reflection on its exterior. If it's not the same ship as before, then it's at least made out of similar materials. When she puts her hand to the hull to touch it, it ripples and spikes out around like a non-Newtonian fluid, and she finds herself pushing right through the hull and walking into the cockpit. As soon as she enters it, the alien-looking cockpit reshapes itself into something she can understand how to use, and the ship itself shifts from that polygonal form into a sort of Gigeresque airfoil shape. It also seems to completely repair itself; it stops smoking, and its engines give a ready glow from their new configuration.
My inference is that the ship only crashed because its previous pilot (who we see no remaining signs of) died. Were it not for that, it could have continually repaired itself by reverting to that pilot's desired form. Some very, very nice tech, here.
Inside the shoggoth-ship's cockpit, elfgirl closes her eyes and has a moment of indecision. Her father's warnings echoing in her mind as she either tries to resist temptation, or to overpower the reservations he instilled in her. Or both at once.
Eventually, the adventurous side of her wins out, and she grabs the controls and initiates takeoff.
“I hear a voice in the back of my head
Screaming “this is suicide! Did you hear what I said?”
But then it fades into nothing with the rest of the light and sound
I’m on my way out!
Lift off!
The firestorm ignites
Last thoughts of a life by candlelight
Inside this speeding satellite”
Reaching orbit takes only seconds, if that. Looking out through the ship's one-way-mirror cockpit canopy, elfgirl learns that her planet's orbitals are a ship graveyard, and the ships don't look like they were scrapped or abandoned. An enormous space battle was fought here.
Definitely seems more likely that her people were shipwreckees, now. That would explain why their houses are made of scrap metal, too. Maybe they've been on the surface for enough generations that their origins are more legend than memory.
As the vocalist reaches the dragged out word "satellite," elfgirl recieves a video message. Either a transmission her ship just recieved, or a recording that had been set to play when the ship returned to orbit. A man (I can't tell if he's the same species as hers or not, due to his obscuring uniform and orange backlights) smiles and gives her a thumbs up. A moment later, she realizes that this isn't a longranged message OR a recording, but a radio transmission from just off her port bow.
You can see him turning away from his webcam to look at her directly on the screen. Nice touch.
A subsequent external shot reveals that it isn't just one ship that's come to greet her, but a whole squadron. Each vessel looks different, and when the visual hails come in the pilots all prove to be different species. We're probably meant to assume that these are all the same type of smartship, with the vessels taking on different forms to suit either the pilot's species or something about their specific personalities. At their invitation, elfgirl follows the aliens to a huge mothership that seems to be holding position in this system.
The aliens might be acting friendly, but the mothership has kind of a sinister look to it, with convoluted dark green greeble and these big orange-and-red panels that resemble insect eyes.
Appearances can be deceiving, of course, but still. Music video. Visual coding is important in these.
Aboard the mothership, elfgirl and her alien friends get a briefing from a holographic...human? Looks like a human. He appears to be explaining the specifics of a war to them, and elfgirl is watching and taking notes intently along with the others. Looks like this mothership is on one side, and the big polygon-ship that fucked with the light earlier is on the other.
So, basically this is The Last Starfighter?
I think this is basically The Last Starfighter.
Well, without the "vidjagaem designed to train unsuspecting primitives in spacefighter combat" part. I'm not sure WHY these guys decided to make elfgirl a soldier, really. Seems like you could give one of those ships to literally anyone and it would work just as well. Dunno.
“Today, so many moons away
I safely say that my heart’s true calling was never betrayed
(Never betrayed)
Arrays of enemies await, but fears allay
We stand as one
A bond beyond the vast wave, until the last grave.”
It turns out to be just like The Last Starfighter, actually, all the way down to the briefing being interrupted by a surprise attack. The mothership trembles under the strength of enemy fire as the hostile forces drop out of hyperspace.
Said hostile forces look...interesting.
On top of escorting the polygon, the enemy fightercraft look just like the previous configuration of elfgirl's smartship.
This is why her father was warning her away from things that looked like that, then? He recognized that light-warping space polygon, from history or legend or personal experience, as a bad guy? The fighter that elfgirl recovered was in the enemy configuration when it crashed, so either it was in enemy hands at the time or the bad guys just use the "factory settings" on the smartships without customizing them like most people do.
If it's the latter, and the crashed one seemed to lack any remains of the pilot...is this an AI faction? Robot overlord has its consciousness housed aboard the big polygon, and either remote-controls or installs sub-sentient "offspring" in its smartships? Maybe? I guess that would explain things, but it's also inferring a lot from relatively little, so I could be totally off.
Anyway, all pilots race to the hangar and get back in their smartships to engage the attacking fleet!
“The mission orders typed and light up our screens
Ignition flights
A thousand minds move simultaneously
Into the night a fleet of firelight jet engines scream
Turn the key
This is my destiny!”
Elfgirl's ship leads the charge, seemingly more out of enthusiasm than any leadership position or tactical placement. Cue big chaotic dogfight scene. It's got a mix of anime and SatAm style cinematography that works well. The smartships have a body-analogue component to their controls, so we get elfgirl and the others doing some dramatic poses inside their cockpits as part of the combat manoeuvring.
They're doing pretty well, for a while.
But then the polygon mothership does something akin to its weird light-bending trick from earlier, and the good guys' navigation gets all fucked up.
“Last flight!
I’d gladly give my life for one night as a justice acolyte
Light shines only for the blind”
Hmm. This suggests that the polygon ship was engaged in battle near her planet when she first saw it. Which in turn suggests that at least some of the wrecks she saw in orbit might have been from that very engagement. That makes it much more ambiguous if her people were shipwrecked there or not, if that ship graveyard actually postdates their habitation there. On the other hand though, like I said, it could be that there have been multiple battles in the planet's orbit, with more hulks being added to the debris field after each one. The polygon as an ancient menace haunting the system, destroying fleet after fleet of would-be interlopers throughout the centuries? Hard to say.
Anyway, some of the Starlight Brigade end up crashing into the enemy mothership because of its sensor fuckery, including elfgirl. They're just mashed up against its impenetrable surface, sitting ducks for the enemy fighters to slowly clean off of the hull with their laser weapons. Inside her cockpit, elfgirl's view fades to black as her g-force injuries seem to claim her. The last thing she sees is her reflection against the reflective surface of the enemy mothership that fills her cockpit canopy. She finally found that light she'd been reaching for since childhood, but it doesn't seem to have been worth it.
“Escape the endless dream of space, black seas that I can’t navigate
Locate the great Starlight Brigade”
This weird luminous patch that she's been wearing on her chest glows brighter as she reaches, consciousness dimming.
Hmm. I looked back now, and that light patch also got brighter when she entered the crashed smartship, and at a few other key moments thus far. The other elves in her village didn't have these (or rather, they sort of did, but their little chest-patches had no light in them at all). I'm not sure if her fellow space warriors do either. A couple of them have chest ornaments that are kiiinda similar, but I don't think they're exactly the same.
Hmm. Not a Green Lantern or Lensman type thing, if the others like her lack them. Something more unique to her or her people? Not sure. The light in hers might correlate to her alone among the villagers having the courage to go up there and face down the polygons instead of cowering from them among the scrap.
The glow brightens as she struggles, but then winks out as she collapses. She seems to be unconscious. Maybe even dead. Hmm, definitely relates to willpower or the like, then.
Suddenly, she has a vision of her child self chasing a light in the sky.
The vocals get all quiet, distorted, and synthesized during this part, and repeat themselves a few times amid instrumental segments.
“We have come so far
Beyond the most distant star
Starlight within will guide us to the other side”
Her child self manages to catch and seize the light, and then present-day elfgirl wakes back up in her cockpit, her chestpatch blazing like a sun and her eyes full of what appears to be literal fire. Her ship does its autorepair thing again (though at this point I'm starting to think it's not the ship that magically repairs and reshapes itself, but the thing on her chest that gives her spaceship-controlling powers...) and she's back in action. Her first act being to floor her ship's thrusters and drive it like a power drill into the mothership's armor.
Seeing what she's doing, the other Starlight Brigadiers do likewise. Charging their craft full-speed into the mothership, applying their combined force to one relatively small section of its glassy hull.
“Lift off!
The firestorm ignites
Last thoughts of a life by candlelight
Inside this speeding satellite”
They break through, and find themselves in some kind of...intermediate space? This weird pocket between layers of the enemy ship.
They move on into the pyramid-shaped pocket of...erm...another dimension? A pocket-universe?...that seems to be inside of the mothership.
I'm starting to think this thing is less of a rogue AI and more of an eldritch abomination that happens to be good with computers.
They fly into a monochrome vortex and...yeah, I don't know what this even is.
The lyrics are appropriate, though.
“Halfway between the black and gray
Is no place for a life to waste away
I’ll take the road with all the stakes (Starlight Brigade)”
They look like they're starting to lose their nerve, or like their ships are starting to lose structural integrity. But then they hit a weird light in the core of the grey nega-dimension, and elfgirl does another anime pose with her eyes and chestpatch all aglow. Blinding flash. Then, they all come erupting out the other side of the mothership like a volley of armor-piercing bullets, shattering it in their wake.
They also seem to have acquired their own color-coding for this segment. They had different colored ships to begin with, but it wasn't nearly this attention-getting.
Too bad this video isn't long enough to give us need to remember which of the brigadiers are which, or for any besides elfgirl to distinguish themselves or have distinct personalities. If it was, the color motifs could have come in handy!
“Black knights and dark side battlecries
All die once they’re in my line of sight
This fight is all I know that’s right (whoa yeah)”
Elfgirl does a little victory dance in her cockpit, which is fairly kawaii. I feel like they might have channelled some Nu She-Ra into her character design, at least with regards to how she shows exuberance. IDK, you tell me.
The now pastel-colored starfighters fly away from the disabled enemy fleet and buzz elfgirl's village. Her people are all standing outside, staring up in wonder at the lightshow.
Even her naysaying father is crying tears of joy; clearly, his warning to her was motivated entirely by a fear for her safety, and seeing her defeat the eldritch abomination(?) that may or may not have been terrorizing their planet since before living memory(?) lays that to rest.
Also, their chest patches are all starting to glow a little now. Maybe reflecting their inspiration at her heroic example, or just the end of their fear now that the space demon is gone for good.
“No fate but that of which we make
Noble as the oath we undertake
We are the great Starlight Brigade!
(Starlight Brigade)”
End with elfgirl and her squadmates doing a SatAm hero team pose over the words "Starlight Brigade." Along with some gratuitous Japanese to make it seem like this might be an anime instead of a western toon.
End song.
Musically speaking, the song got more balanced as it went on. The vocals were a bit too loud for the music during the first stanza, but the instruments kicked into higher gear once elfgirl started her adventure and the song reached its full energy, and it sounded good from that point on. I'm not in love with Avidan's voice even then, but it didn't bother me either. It's got a good beat, a good pace, and the tune is very catchy and hummable.
Visually, it certainly knows exactly what it's trying to do. I'll let one of the top-rated YouTube comments explain what the vid was going for:
“Why in the seven hells of Washington D.C. was this never made into a series from 1984 to 1987, ending with an unsatisfactory cliffhanger, a movie in 1989 with an epic soundtrack that answers nothing, and a revival film in 2008 that didn’t capture the feel of the original, only for the Fandom to make an earth-shattering free-to-view movie in 2012 that’s entirely computer-graphic’d but with the appearance of proper cell shaded animation, and the surviving voices of the original cast, minus two who tragically passed away already?”
And yeah, it's pretty much that. Though I think they might be talking about the original English dub when referring to the voice actors, assuming this was a Japanese import that aired on Toonami rather than some obscure Euro-Canadian collaboration's work. :V
The character and environment designs are pretty thick with references and shoutouts. I already pointed out the She-Ra and Last Starfighter elements, but there's way more than that. Elfgirl's species are almost a dead ringer for the abh (holy shit I actually typed "amarki" before catching myself :p), from "Crest of the Stars." The lion-headed alien looks a heck of a lot like a kilrathi, from the "Wing Commander" games. The multi-limbed cyborg dude...I can't quite put my finger on it, but I *know* I've seen the thing that his design is homage-ing. The wacky dimensional shenanigans inside the alien structure, and the appearance of the structure itself, were pretty clearly "2001," but the inspiration probably made it here by way of "Interstella 5555," with the shot of them breaking out of the mothership and destroying it also possibly being a reference to this famous album cover (amending this a little: I watched that scene again, and before the polygon mothership explodes you see a split second of it looking like this. There's no "possibly" here, heh).
In short, it's a love letter to a certain...I can't really say "era," but a sort of VIBE. A certain brand of offbeat pop scifi, and a certain brand of offbeat rock music that are both very popular, but somehow are never the first things that most people think of when you tell them to name a famous space opera franchise or a famous rock band. And there's a kind of shared semi-psychedelia that makes them go well together as well as them just sharing the same cultural space juuuuust outside the main spotlight.
...also, reading other commentary about this video now, there's something very important and central to the piece that I apparently totally misinterpreted. The alien mothership wasn't just fucking with light rays when elfgirl saw it in the sky at first, it was actually stealing all the stars out of the damned sky. Destroying it freed the stars again at the end, though visually it was a lot less clear how that was happening; what cinches it is that the stars are visible at the beginning and end, but not for the in between, which at the time my brain just registered as an aesthetic choice to highlight the ships and characters more clearly.
That definitely adds a lot more significance to the recurring motif of her reaching for the light, and explains why she was so dismayed when she saw the bad guys do the thing at the beginning, and why the lights went out in all her neighbor's chest-ornaments until the sky was fixed. Girl just really, really, REALLY wanted her damned stars back. Gives the whole thing a mythic dimension too. I'm thinking of Native American legends like "How Raven Stole the Sun" in particular.
Granted, these "stars" are obviously something very different from the ones we're used to, if life was able to survive for multiple years without them. At least, assuming you take this all literally. Which, now that I'm aware of what was happening with the stars throughout the video, I'm much, much less inclined to do.
This music video might be nostalgic in its aesthetics, but it's very contemporary in its politics. In a way that the retro-aesthetics actually helps to emphasize.
Stars have always been associated with fate, destiny, and the future. For people who grew up in the twentieth century, it goes even further. When westerners of my and Dan Avidan's generations were children, everyone was telling us that the stars would literally be our future. We were going up there. The cold war was ending. The internet was bringing the world together. We were going to switch over to green energy (and even if we didn't, the environmental problems would be a long time away, and probably not that bad even if they came early). We were going to live to see our grandchildren settle the solar system.
The zoomers in my audience might think we were stupid, and you're right. We were stupid. In our defense though, they told us this. Everyone told us this. Our parents, our teachers, our politicians, our media, everyone.
Some of these promises were just idiotic to begin with, of course, even taking the gullibility of youth into account. The environmental optimism in the face of the power of short-term state and capital interests. The unrealistic expectations for at least some branches of science and technology. But, there were also some of them that I think really could have been delivered on. There was some genuine hope in there alongside the arrogance. Even if the stars would have never been the literal realization of that hope, they very much could have remained its symbol.
Something emptied the sky.
Something rigid, geometric, and insatiably hungry. Something with soulless mass-produced armies to run roughshod over any who might prevent it from gobbling up and digesting every last star.
“Can I just stand by while the world dies?”
I mean. Yes, obviously. We have been. Hell, we grew up to help kill it.
Since that first watching, I've been having trouble getting this song out of my head, and the implications of what it's saying kind of scare me. After all, when you think about the symbolism, and then hear lyrics like
“Last flight; I’d gladly give my life/for one night as a justice acolyte”
or
“Halfway between the black and gray
Is no place for a life to waste away
I’ll take the road with all the stakes”
and see some bits of imagery in the video that goes with it, you naturally realize that there's nothing here to analyse and this whole review was a pointless bit of intellectual masturbation. I don't have anything else to say about this video. Those are all of my thoughts.
Next music video review should be up tomorrow.
