vivafringe

Man, writing intros is such a pain. Just imagine that I filled this space with the usual caveats and qualifications and let's move on.

Honorable Mention: Purple Bell’s entire channel

Cutting to a top 10 is brutal and I can see why these lists eventually balloon into 50 videos. In particular, Purple Bell had a boatload of contenders, some of which barely didn’t make the cut. Each week that the channel was active this year was a little treat, a window into a piece of older animation I'd never heard of set to wonderful evocative music. Ultimately, it was hard to even narrow down the video of his that I enjoyed the most, so it felt fitting to instead list the entire channel. Because of the shared aesthetic and editing style, the collection of videos feels like more than the sum of its parts. It represents a creative explosion, and it’s inspiring that it came from someone who was struggling with burnout at the end of last year. As someone who struggles to get 8 videos out in a year, seeing 29 videos slammed out over 29 weeks is just incredible.

10. Make the Moves up as I go

To be brutally honest, the first 30 seconds of “Make the Moves up as I go” feel like artistic antimatter to me. We’ve got goofy moe (do people still use that word?) lip syncing set to one of Taylor Swift’s most enduring radio earworms and while it’s not bad, for my personal tastes it has me itching for the exit. But then the dancing starts.

I don’t think it’s hyperbole for me to say this is the best dancing sync I have ever seen in an AMV. It’s phenomenal. There are tons of small details that are just stunning. Korhal obsessively syncs to every word of the refrain, every clap sound, the little “mmm mmm” hums, every goddamn thing in the song. And for the most part they use long cuts that look naturally synced. It's an incredible achievement.

And because of that the “antimatter” aesthetics do some weird horseshoe thing from cringe back to amazing. It makes me love idol dancing, and I hate idol dancing. What else is there to say?

9. Anxiety/Dead Reckoning

I had an interesting experience with this video. The first time, I watched it blind at a contest with no context, where it was simply called “Dead Reckoning”. After the contest, I went back to rewatch it. It had been renamed to “Anxiety/Dead Reckoning” with “It’s about anxiety attacks” in the video description.

And… I’m conflicted about it, because in some ivory tower I would want art to “speak for itself” and exist beautifully in a vacuum. But the reality, the “dead reckoning” I had to come to terms with myself, was that art is better with context. Knowing what Dead Reckoning was about moved it from a good amv to a great one. It perhaps shows a weakness of the blind contest format of ACCY/RICE (which I otherwise love): I’ve found that knowing the person behind the video can deepen my appreciation for the video itself, and removing that can steal some of the more personal touches of an AMV.  

Watching the heroine seep into despair and then claw her way out of it has an incredibly cathartic effect on me. As weird as this might sound, it’s oddly comforting to watch her totally lose her shit, because it resonates with some of my past experience and reminds me that other people have been through the same thing. One of my favorite quotes is “art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed,” and this seems fitting here.

What strikes me most about this one is that the things plaguing the main character in this AMV are never explained or even fully shown. You only see shadowy tendrils creeping in at the edges of your peripheral vision, accompanied by a mounting sense of dread and foreboding. As the lyrics say, “I’m desperate and don’t know why.” Panic attacks are often like that - you are haunted by demons you aren't sure even exist.

This seems to show a facet of the human condition in the modern era. It’s easy to sense something is terribly askew, that we went down a wrong turn somewhere and now there’s no going back. But we don’t know exactly what the issue is, let alone what we can do to fix it. All of the material comforts of the world can’t quell the gnawing feeling that something is wrong.

In desperate times where we have lost our way, the only way back is forward. You can see the main character clawing her way forward to break out of the ill-defined prison in the AMV’s climax. Is this prison something real and tangible, or just a figment of her imagination? It’s hard to say. Finally she breaks free, and finds herself in a psychedelic alien world. Is it good? Bad? The only sure thing is that it’s strange and different. The future is like that.

8. Distressed

It’s not like “psychedelic” videos haven’t been around for a long time, but they felt different. Older psychedelia seemed to mostly be about hypnotizing you, inducing an altered state from flashy kaleidoscopic rainbow barf. Distressed has some of that, but is mostly doing something different - using evocative imagery to induce a wide range of moods in ways that your conscious self doesn’t fully understand. Analyzing “what’s happening” is like trying to nail jello to a wall, and eventually all you can do is let the jello ooze past your ego directly into your limbic system.

And it’s a glorious experience, a smooth-as-hell joyride through death and joy and everything in between. I’m frankly jealous of how seamless this is. The first few times I watched, I didn’t even notice the aspect ratio changing. When I finally noticed, I knew I was in the hands of a world class magician.

BoxJoe is another newer editor who seems to have started around the same time I did, about four years ago, and it’s impossible not to see similarities between our work. The focus on obsessively syncing glorious sakuga to evocative EDM tracks can be felt in both of our stuff. And like me, he has now been blessed with the “vibes” label, courtesy of Accolades, which I was both surprised, pleased and horrified to see carry over from RICE. At this point, I am coming to terms with the idea that we might be stuck with the label forever. So what are “vibes” again?

At Accolades this year, we once again discussed what the term meant, with various people submitting definitions. Finally someone said, “It sounds like vibes is being high.” And… I think they inadvertently said the quiet part out loud. These types of videos were rarer 25 years ago, when “marijuana” was a dirty word. Now weed is de facto legal in most states, and suddenly these vibey videos are cropping up more and more. How mysterious!

A part of me wants to leave it at that, to not try to justify the genre any further. To some extent if you watch videos as evocative and beautiful as Distressed and “don’t get it,” you’re just a sober square, dude. But writing is the domain of the ego and so I feel compelled to make a case. Now, more than ever, it feels like we are losing our grip on reality. I don’t even need to specify anything in particular; I can just say RECENT_POLITICAL_EVENT and you’ll know what I’m getting at. If we are ever going to return to emotional sobriety, I think it’s vital to reconnect with our emotional self and understand what’s going on underneath the hood. And what better way to do that than to watch some guy artistically barfing a fish into a cup, making you feel emotions you never knew you had?

We live in a world in flux. Automation has been ramping up for centuries, leaving humans with less and less to do. And now it has come for art in the form of a beautiful, perfect woman with weird hands.

AI is profoundly changing our shared reality. My wife has started getting internal work emails clearly generated by ChatGPT. Google queries have been infected by AI spam and are less accurate. Deepfakes of celebrities saying ridiculous BS are posted to social media on the daily. We are entering a dream we may never wake up from.

I don’t pretend to be happy about the rapid ascendance of AI. It scares the fuck out of me. But I’m also confident that the cat is out of the bag. There will be no Butlerian Jihad. We can never go back; AI is here. People are already losing their jobs. Alexa, play Despacito.

So what do we do about it? Do we push down the existential dread deep down and pretend like the world isn’t changing? Do we put our faith in a government stuffed with senile invalids by our clueless boomer parents? Do we yell at the beautiful copyright infringing AI amalgamated fluffy clouds? I think we should instead seriously consider how this new technology can be used for good, because God knows it is already being used for ill. And that’s why, while I can’t completely lose myself in this AMV the way the creators might want me too, I still love and appreciate it. AMV editing has always been about gleefully violating copyright laws, of ripping off other artists to create something transformative outside the traditional capitalist frame of intellectual property, and as such I see no ethical quandary in using AI to augment amvs. It certainly falls under the umbrella of “transformative” to me.

As Bauzi admits in the video description, there’s only so much the tech can accomplish at this point and in a few years, the AMV is doomed to fall into obsolescence, just like how all those twixtor vids from 5 years ago look terrible today. But for now, Bauzi and Arcothy have gone all out to merge AI seamlessly with their already beautiful anime sources. I find myself constantly second guessing which parts are AI and which are not. The emotional result for me is a complex mix of fear, anxiety, awe, wonder, and dare I say it - hope. It’s a far cry from the simple, relaxing AI-free mood piece I watched as a beta in RICE.

Ironically, one thing I love about this video is the emphasis on humanity. As we are shown gorgeous fantasies, one after another, there is always at least one human watching the world warp and change with us. The final shot of the amv is perhaps the best one. Two people watch, holding hands as the illusion finally fades.

If we are ever going to survive this, it will have to be together.

6. Last Forever

I have a theory about why this hits so hard, and it’s explained well by famed EDM artist Porter Robinson. No, he didn’t make the song to this video; I just think he’s cool, ok? Anyway, please enjoy this youtube short about the concept of “happy sad”.

I love “happy-sad” in art. It’s like sweet and sour sauce; the combination gives more flavor than either of the two on their own would normally provide. Whoever made the short used a yin yang and I think that’s appropriate here. Without happiness, how can we ever grieve the loss of it? And without sadness, how can we appreciate the good times?

I don’t know if this is what Katranat was consciously going for, but for me at least, this is the core dynamic powering this AMV. The thumbnail kind of says it all, doesn’t it? There’s also this absolutely gorgeous shot from the same scene:

The extended final scene might seem a little random, but put into this context, it suddenly makes perfect sense. A character on a rickety bike collides into a small pebble and crashes into the street, enraged and injured. They at first fixate on this tiny pebble that has inconvenienced them, this small insignificant thing that doesn’t matter at all in the grand scale of the universe but is nonetheless their sole frustrated focus. Finally the character turns and realizes the sun is shining.

5. Reading Reincarnation

There’s a tendency to give top 10 slots to the videos that swing for the fences, the pretentious haymakers that ask weighty existential questions, or use a million billion effects that must have taken years. Coming up with this list, I felt the pull of this myself. At the end of the year the ambitious videos stick in my memory, while the simpler concepts fade away.

And this is tragic, because gems like this quickly get forgotten. When I initially watched this at RICE, I was struck by the complete absence of irony and humor. There’s a tendency to poke fun at old things from our childhood, to demonstrate how much we’ve grown in sophistication from the puerile simpletons we once were. I love that this refuses to go down that route; instead, we get a purehearted celebration of the original Reading Rainbow TV show, a love letter to a precious childhood memory.

And what better anime source to pick than Ascendance of a Bookworm, the wholesome isekai for people that hate isekais? Isekais are primarily about wish fulfillment, of accomplishing in another world what we can’t manage here. Most of the time, not to put too fine a point on it, that involves banging a lot of chicks and conquering the world. But Bookworm stands out as a purehearted gem, an earnest wish that the booksmarts we’ve slowly acquired from years of introversion could be used to better the world around us.

After I watched this at RICE, I found out the editor, Camichan19, was a librarian. Because of course she is! This is as genuine and heartfelt as AMVs come, and I don’t see how someone could manage this level of earnest sincerity without a deep personal connection to the original Reading Rainbow series.

4. Don’t Try to Erase Your Emotions

So what’s the deal with dancing, anyway? Why am I so obsessed with it? I love making and watching dance AMVs, I love sneaking dance clips into vids where it’s barely appropriate, and most of all, I love dancing.

This video is perhaps the most concise explanation of what’s going on. My personality has a tendency to mask my emotions, to filter them out as background noise. To keep calm, cool and collected in the face of adversity. In some situations this is highly adaptive. You don’t really want to process your emotions when you’re driving on a 6-lane highway, when you’re taking a math test, or when you’re interviewing for a job. You could in fact say, pretty confidently, that our modern world consistently rewards those who learn to repress any and all emotion.

At some point you are either going to end up depressed and hollow, a joyless husk, or you’re going to realize that erasing your emotions is as futile as making a river flow upstream. And that’s when it’s time to dance.

There are two types of dancing. “Make the Moves Up As I Go” shows off a purified form of performative dance. We see synchronized idol routines, innovative twists and turns, and people hamming it up for a camera they know is there. As much as Taylor Swift wants you to believe that she’s unscripted, uncalculated and pure, let’s be honest, there’s a lot of thought and effort put into her dancing. She does not, in fact, make the moves up as she goes. While dancing a choreographed routine is a ton of fun, we can’t forget that its primary purpose is for the benefit of the audience.

“Don’t Try to Erase Your Emotions” has some choreographed stuff as well, but I think it’s primarily focused on the second type of dancing. The dancing you do at 2 AM in your kitchen, not for the benefit of any onlooker, but for bodily self expression, of giving your emotions the space they need and crave. Do these people look like they give a single fuck about who’s watching?

We’ve talked about happy-sad, and this isn’t that, but another flavor of two sided emotion. Listen to the refrain where the singer belts out “DONT TRY TO ERASE YOUR EMOTIONS” in high pitched falsetto. Out of context, stripped of the accompanying music, this is the kind of nails on chalkboard sound that would trigger a panic attack. The mood of this song and video is anxious-joy.

One of my favorite editing techniques is stringing together a lot of very different art styles and moods into one quick sequence. It’s easy to dismiss this as “random” but done properly I think it works wonderfully at conveying complex, multifaceted emotional states like happy-sad and anxious-joy. This vid does this especially well. There are so many different emotions crammed into the short runtime that it borders on whiplash, but the assured editing, anchored in rhythm and dance, never allows things to spiral out of control. This is a rich, stylish and kickass dance AMV that I’ve come back to time and time again over the course of the year, but what keeps me coming back is the emotional nuance.

3. Magic Hour Re-edit

Do you, the reader, even remember the first time you watched Your Name? The wonder, the heartbreak, the amazement at a beautiful story? Yeah, I don’t either, not really. It’s been lost to time, forgotten.

These days, AMVers cringe a little if you talk about Your Name. It was massively popular when released, and a million AMVs came out for it. Burnout was inevitable and the movie has become a victim of its own spectacular success. I’ve talked with some people that never watched the film, but feel like they’ve already “seen” the entire movie from countless AMVs. The characters of Your Name will never be able to go back to the small town of Itomori that got blown away, and we will never be able to return to the time when we could watch Your Name with fresh, unjaded eyes.

This feeling of joy, love and catharsis slipping away into the void of long-term memory is at the core of what Your Name is really all about. It might be what most of Makoto Shinkai’s films are really all about.

And so with this interpretation I see special significance in Synaesthesia’s decision to go back and re-edit his very first AMV, all the way back from five years ago. Am I crazy, or does this not mirror the same dynamic I just outlined?! By going back and re-editing, Syn forced himself to re-engage with an old pairing, to brush aside the cringe of looking in the mirror at his old, more naive self and to polish it into something both his past and present selves could be proud of. In doing so, he reconnects with the past in the same way the boy in Your Name connects with the girl from a past time.

Synaesthesia has understandably removed the older version of this amv, so I can’t directly compare the two videos. My hazy memory of the older version is that the pairing was inspired and that there were incredible moments (the explosion was definitely there!), but that some technical issues kept me at arms’ length. This remake not only cleans all of that up, but the scene selection hits even harder than before. It’s a noticeable upgrade.

However, while we need to thank New Synaesthesia for cleaning this up and improving just about everything, Old Synaesthesia still gets a lot of credit for the original idea and the proof of concept. I just don’t know if New Synaesthesia would have it in him, in 2023, to make a Your Name AMV set to a postrock song. His older self had to send a message to his future self, a red string of fate if you will, for the newer self to make this blisteringly emotional masterpiece about striving to keep our feelings and sentiments alive.

I find the ending heartbreaking. Following the mood of the song, Syn closes with the 2 characters saying goodbye to each other. They turn around, surrounded by snow, and leave. After all of the struggle to form a meaningful connection, their bond fades into dust, as all bonds do. It makes appreciating the relationships we have here and now all the more important.

2. Heartificial Rebirth

I remember the pure, unbridled disgust from my wife when she found out this wasn’t going to go anywhere at RICE. “This community is dumb,” she groused (I don’t endorse this take). The salt was unreal.

All of my family loved this video. My 1 year old watched this over and over again, fascinated by the 3D images of kitty coupled with the pulsing techno track. My wife and I loved the thematically perfect pairing between the Porter Robinson track and the cyberpunk aesthetic of Stray. Also: kitty.

Let’s talk about Porter Robinson for a second. He cut his teeth making dumb “banger” EDM nonsense that he would go on to disown as he evolved as an artist. Most of his old stuff is unlistenable to me in $CURRENT_YEAR. But today, he's crafting almost desperately authentic expressions of humanity that crackle through the electronic beeps and boops.

This arc as an artist mirrors the journey of the cat in Stray, who falls into a technological hellscape and spends the entire game length clawing its way out… but not before befriending some robots (beep boop techno noises). In both song and source there's an unmistakable theme of striving to preserve our humanity (or kittyity, I guess?) in the face of oppressive dystopian mechanization. As someone with conflicting feelings about modern society, this resonates deeply with me.

And so after RICE, I waited for this to be released. And waited, and waited, and waited. 7 months passed. I finally decided I’d had enough and dm’d MinetChan with a polite version of WHERE VIDEO. As I kind of suspected, she had had some misgivings about it, and had left it in indefinite purrgatory (I stole this pun). A week after I messaged, she posted it and I thanked her profusely. The first time I showed it again to my son, he smiled and pointed. Kitty!

She never said or implied this, but I personally wonder about how much of these feelings stemmed from the lukewarm reception at RICE. MinetChan is a talented editor used to cleaning up at these things. When a video fails to engage with a majority of an audience, it’s easy to view it as a failure, and it’s possible that happened here. And maybe this is all projection on my part, because I’ve felt all these things myself when entering videos into contests that are met with a collective shrug.

But either way I think it’s possible that a video can fail to cater to a majority of people and still have immense value as a work of art. The real meaning comes from the people your work touches and influences, and this video had a profound effect on my entire family.

Also, kitty!

1. It’s Okay to Let the Train Pass

I boldly declared the video was uneditable and linked the video to vars, half hoping that he’d prove me wrong. And of course, he instantly had an idea. I was really intrigued by this - what was his idea? Had I missed something obvious about the song? Well, I said, my birthday is coming up! And then I promptly forgot about the conversation. Dad-brain amnesia is a powerful force.

When the video was unveiled on my birthday, it came as a complete surprise and had a powerful effect. Days after I watched the video, things seemed brighter, more colorful. I had been mildly depressed about getting older, of feeling things less deeply, and this was a powerful antidote. I’ve since watched it a lot, sometimes just enjoying the experience, and other times studying to figure out why I had failed and vars had succeeded so brilliantly.

I think the key ingredient, the secret sauce, is he understood what the song is really about: waking up from depression and experiencing the full force of the emotions your brain had adaptively been repressing (the train). This understanding informed his editing choices and let him make a powerful video. I think the clearest example of this is his choice to begin with blurry, black and white images, gradually letting color and focus seep in. This never occurred to me, because it had never occurred to me that the song was about depression at all. Now that I’ve seen it, I have to admit that it’s a perfect choice that naturally falls out of understanding the fundamental concept of the song.

After the beginning, the scene selection all seems to be informed by this sense of waking up from whatever mundane thing we were occupying ourselves with, looking around, and seeing the world for the beautiful, overwhelming mess that it is. As the girl and her loveable dog from Fullmetal Alchemist run by, are we supposed to feel happy? Sad? Horrified? Anxious? Again, we come across the concept of happy-sad. The answer is yes, we’re supposed to feel all of those. Everything everywhere all at once as the train comes roaring at us at 500 mph.

A recurring theme of this list is the tendency for adults to lose their sense of childlike joy, for everything to become dreary and meaningless, to fall into a depression where nothing seems to matter. Fighting against this inevitable force is one of the main reasons I make and watch AMVs, and so seeing a crystalized antidote to depression is reason enough for this to make this list. It’s Okay to Let the Train Pass is a reflective treatise on how aging dulls your sense of wonder, one that practically forces you to re-engage with your senses. But what brings this to number one is the personal connection. Getting it on my birthday, from a friend who is as familiar with depression as that FMA girl is with her dog, hit me like a proverbial freight train. Forget amvs, it was one of the most emotionally influential moments in my entire year, period. I personally couldn’t think of a better birthday present.

One of the final scenes hits the hardest - a child, staring in open mouthed astonishment at raindrops falling on the window sill of his apartment. Forget Taylor Swift, forget Bill Gates, forget even the illustrious Porter Robinson. I wanna be this guy.