the simplest choice

The animated music video for “The Simplest Choice”, animated by BONZIE’s friend Miyo Sato has been released on her YouTube.  In an email sent to her mailing list, BONZIE wrote about the creation of the music video and her relationship with Miyo.  She wrote:

In 2020, during one of the darkest points of human life in the last century, I was mid-quarantine and attempting to finish an album I had begun before life on Earth had other plans. Desperate for inspiration and determined to finish my project safely, I explored animation– a method of making music videos one could do remotely– that is, for two artists to be in two different places in the world and still create the same high-level art without breaking quarantine. By a string of miracles, I was connected to Miyo Sato— a brilliant, decidedly analogue animator who was also facing a pandemic and quarantine– the same predicament across the world in Japan. Fast forward nearly a year later, Miyo and I had been video chatting regularly– sometimes daily– creating a finger-paint animation for my song ‘alone‘, laughing about language mistranslations, confiding in each other about the upsetting national and international news, sharing movies, music, and the contents of our lives, somehow becoming so processable and contained as we shared between two computer screens, with the span of a whole planet between us. We made the music video, Miyo doing the painting and animating, and me mainly talking in my broken (yet improving) Japanese. What we gained from our collaboration was far beyond even our own art. The video we made for ‘alone’ was screened for a full month in Japan at an outdoor art festival mid-pandemic, aimed at inspiring hope in the city of Nagoya.

‘alone’ went on to become one of The New York Times’s Best Songs Of 2020.

I had the wonderful opportunity to meet Miyo in person in Japan this January– a first meeting that felt like the thousanth. Our time hanging out all over Tokyo was filled with an array of individual funny, unplanned miracles and coincidences– something we’ve both noted as some kind of cosmic overlapping that seems to happen over and over with us.

When I was finalizing the mixes for my newest album When I Found The Trap Door, I knew I wanted to, if I could, make another piece of art to go alongside a song with Miyo. I was so thrilled to watch what she created upon hearing the song: my Yorkie Kiki and me in our own sweet anime world. Miyo finished this animation right before she had her first baby– her last animation before her world completely changed and blossomed. It is a profound moment that she froze in time; a loop of the daily life I now currently have with my Kiki– a loop that I know, as always with our sweet pets, will not last forever. But on some cosmic level, it does. With this animation, Miyo portrayed a true, fundamental type of love: a daily ritual, a passage of time, a dedication, 付き合う。She concentrated something special and simple– the simplest— into a visual story. I can feel the freedom in her drawing, as the camera pans above us, above the birds, into the clouds, watching us run somewhere beyond– beyond these confines of language, material life, country borders, and time.

The Simplest Choice music video has been screened at X Space art gallery in Bangkok, Thailand from September-December 2024.

The Simplest Choice by BONZIE in Bangkok, Thailand!

Please enjoy the new animated music short, The Simplest Choice, out now!