Jonas Odell of Sweden’s Film Tecknarna is an innovator in animated music videos as evident in these shots from the latest Goldfrapp track. Courtesy of Film Tecknarna.

Few folks remember the one-hit wonders of the music world or their here today, gone tomorrow videos. However, when their performance is showcased in an animated video, its memorability quotient jumps up a notch or three. It’s been quite a few years since a-ha was a hot group, but people still remember the rotoscoped, comic book come to life animation of their “Take on Me” video (including Seth MacFarlane, who spoofed it in a recent Family Guy episode). And once you’ve seen the video of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” it’s impossible to ever hear the song again without thinking of the video’s amazing stop motion animation, early work from Aardman Animations.

Standout animated videos are usually built around the visual equivalent of a musical ‘hook’ — an unforgettable image or on-screen style, the visual equivalent of humming a catchy tune. “Californication,” Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 2001 video turned the band into videogame characters navigating a maze of Golden State landmarks.

The project was directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, and animated by now defunct studio Pixel Envy. The band members were motion captured for the game animation, and filmed in performance for additional reference — footage that was incorporated into the finished piece playing on a screen within the videogame. According to Bart Lipton, the video’s producer, “the animation started out crude, and Jonathan and Valerie were concerned about how videogame technology was advancing — every year or two there’s a huge leap in the quality of the graphics.” To keep the video’s ersatz game from looking instantly out of date, the creators procured a grey market PlayStation 2 from Japan and a Crazy Taxi game disc that became the inspiration for the onscreen action. “We approached actual game designers, but they didn’t have 40 people to spare to throw at a project like this. They were all busy working on long-range projects for actual games.”

The definition of an “animated” video can be as elastic as the imagery they contain. Many directors consider live action footage — of the band, of performers acting out the song’s narrative — another graphic element to composite into the final product. Jonas Odell of Film Tecknarna in Stockholm, Sweden (http://www.filmtecknarna.se) is responsible for a slew of videos that immerse musicians in whirling environments of color, iconic animating loops and endless perspectives of digitally replicated people and objects.

Odell uses After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator to build his graphics and will shoot on video, film or DV as his budgets dictates. He cites painters like Ernst, DeChirico and Magritte as sources of inspiration, as well as filmmakers Tarkovsky, Kubrick and Truffaut. (And though his style would be at home in a James Bond credit sequence he discounts 007 as an influence on his work.) “Normally you see images and motion when you hear a piece of music the first time,” he explained. “Then you evaluate these ideas to see whether they fit into the ‘world’ of the artist as you perceive it. I felt there were several music styles coming together in the Goldfrapp track with quite a hypnotic feeling to it, so I tried to reflect that by using a collage style with kaleidoscope effects.”