This is a rather unusual video. We last saw She’s Insane in 1999. They have a late ’90s alterno pop sound, like a local Veruca Salt. Somehow by 2000 it’s all starting to sound a bit dated, a bit too thin and tweet compared to the fleshier rock sound that was making itself known.
The band’s previous videos focused on the band itself, but this one is an animated job. And it’s a good example of why it’s hard to make a good animated music video.
The main problem is the animation is extremely repetitive. The video is based on a group of four skeletons that represent the band. At the beginning of the video there’s an attempt to have one skeleton singing the song, but that soon falls away. After about the first 30 seconds, we start to see repeated bits of animation, and it feels like those scenes from the Flintstones where Dino runs past the same pot plant 20 times.
The background of the video is usually plain black, though one time a random brick warehouse is thrown in, just to make everything else look even more boring in comparison.
It ends up feeling not so much like a video but more like someone mucking around with some 3D animation software, using skeletons because they’re easier to animate than whole humans and they look cool. And it’s weird, but compared to this, the awful dancing baby animation of the ’90s has character.
This was the last She’s Insane video to have NZ On Air funding and it doesn’t feel like they were a band who grew from their experience. There was potential in there, but I feel like they should have been out gigging more and writing more songs before they were unleashed on the world at large.
Best bit: the doll, showing that weird music video skeletons have a heart.
Next… a probing date.