As if anyone needed any more reason to go see Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 masterpiece Princess Mononoke on the big screen Thursday night–watching arguably a great artist’s greatest work of art should be its own reward–the Fathom event presented by GKIDS also featured a 1995 music video directed by Miyazaki that has never been shown in North America before. The music video is for Japanese duo Chage & Asaka’s song “On Your Mark,†and GKIDS has a clip (above) to entice you even further (via IndieWire).
It’s got a definite Akira vibe with a futuristic cityscape where apparent civil unrest is rampant, hence the battle between the police and the…not-police. True to Miyazaki’s proclivities, the clip has tons of airships and, if one were to compare it to any of Miyazaki’s feature films, it seems the most like his 1984 pre-Ghibli opus, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. It’s often weird to see Miyazaki do dystopian sci-fi, but he can definitely pull it off better than you’d expect.
While he only directed 11 feature films (to date, he might do more), he’s directed several short films, most of which have never been available here in the United States. We recently told you about his next short, entitled Boro the Caterpillar, which is getting released this year at the Studio Ghibli Museum in Japan (as is the case for several of the maestro’s short works). I feel like there’s a wealth of Miyazaki goodness out there waiting for us to see. I hope that one day a box set of Ghibli shorts gets released over here, but for now, a 22 year old music video that looks weird as hell will have to do.
Image: GKIDS/Studio Ghibli
Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. He’s the writer of Studio Ghibli retrospectives Miyazaki Masterclass and Takahata Textbook. Follow him on Twitter!
