Animators and filmmakers Jenny Lucia Mascia and Jeremy Higgins created the music video for Khruangbin’s new single “May Ninth,” which was recently made available to watch online.
The video’s palette of yellows, oranges, pinks, and reds gives it a springtime feel that matches the song’s lyrics, themes, and title well. Mascia told Cartoon Brew that the video is “an allegory for birth, exploring life, living cycles, and interconnectedness between all things.”
“When I develop a world, I want the visuals to embed the arc and emotions of the story. In a way, this is a coming-into-life journey, and I wanted that to be reflected in some style progression; the beginning is in a monochromatic yellow/orange palette, and the world feels more abstracted as it’s slowly becoming,” she explained. “As we progress into the video, more colors enter the palette, forms become more defined, and gouache is introduced to make elements more physical, closer to taking shape into who they will be.”
According to the filmmakers, they wanted to create a world that would feel familiar, yet different from our own, because “before being born, we don’t truly know what the world looks like yet.”
To that end, Higgins said one of the first things he did when he started working on the video was to research animal and insect life that has traditionally represented themes of life, fertility, and innocence.
“From there, I combined different aspects of them to form the creatures that you see throughout our video,” he elaborated. “Each of the creatures had visual elements to tie them to the world to further expand on the interconnectedness between all lifeforms.”
The result is three minutes of visual poetry that flows as smoothly as the music and lyrics backing it.
