Analysing: Kagerou Days

The first music video I have decided to analyse will be Kagerou Days, a song composed by Jin and is part of the Kagerou Project series, a independent project that features a abundant of songs that when put together creates a story. A popular internet phenomenon, the series had been commissioned with novels, comics and a television series that is currently in production. This is one of the first in the series that explains the story of two children who are constantly trying to save each other's lives at the prive of their own, forever trapped in a time loop. This is personally one of my favorite songs from the series and is actually the first song that introduced me to the Vocaloid and Utaite genre.  The video starts off in a grainy textured video that reflects a grim and dire situation. This is further supported by the fact that a character is crying over a body. We cannot fully make out the character's faces, which makes the situation raises a variety of questions. What has happened? Who are these two characters? Is this something that has happened or is happening?  The video also makes use of the blood splatter or splatter effect to simulate movement when there is any actual blood being created, setting a specific scene, or creating suspense and foreshadowing as well as being a overall border when anything traumatic or gorey has happened. This is also makes the animation, much more darker even though of i's simplistic cartoony style. The characters themselves are in black and white as well as some other elements of the video, making it more graphic, which contrasts against the coloured elements to bring them out (like the blood splatters for example.). The blue hues used is often used with a gradient to create a serene atmosphere, in any tension packed scene, it is more subtle and creates an unsettling look when mixed in with the red of the blood.

Analysing it with western music videos, it is very rare for any music video here to include any animation at all. There have been quite a few that have like Brittany Spears "Break The Ice", but there are not any very notable examples to name. This animation is still a major part of Japanese pop culture and I think it is one of the main reasons why it is still mainly used. Whilst in the west animation, especially 2-D animation is still very much judged upon as being quite childish and not entirely suited for adults. But as anime has shown it is a medium that can be used to create something quite dramatic and is easy to edit into with music.

I would like to take the simplistic use of colouring of the animation into consideration for my own music video, as well as the way it is edited to fit into the beat. The use of textures and different shapes too is something to think about as well as making colours stand out, or using no colours at all to make it even more ominous and dark.