To correct our previous document of this video, Snowbound is the video before Björk's Human Behaviour.
Donald Fagen, a.k.a. one-half of Steely Dan, offers this slow-burning ballad that combines hot urban club scenes with freezing temperatures. ėSnowbound,î from his album Kamakiriad, juxtaposes his soft, floating music with descriptions of urban adventure. Michel Gondry, in quite the same way, mixes a futuristic, Big Brother work-city with the soft touches of Winter.
The video is half-stop motion animation, half-real-time footage. To capture this modern, man-made world, Gondry's team created loads of models. They combined the two in post-production, superimposing each person's head onto the models, as well as adding skies, falling snow, and other atmospheric effects. The same heads-on-models effect is used later by production team Hammer & Tongs, aka Garth Jennings (see their Lamb and Eels videos).
The story is a small, almost cute anecdote, even in such ugly/beautiful surroundings, most of which were found in a rubbish dump. Mixed in a red haze, worker drones travel from their maximum-efficiency homes to the cold, cluttered city. A little man worker and a little woman worker are spotlighted in their travels. They drive around the city, over tall bridges, onto an icy river, etc, and wind up together.
As they drive, Donald Fagen's face is visible on televisions everywhere. He is watching everybody from a tower high above the skyline, while casually singing Snowbound.
When one worker drone gets out of line, Fagen zaps him with lightning. After getting zapped, the drone gets pissed and drives up the giant tower. He beats Donald Fagen up - in the lightest, funniest manner possible - and sends him flying off the tower. Then he takes Fagen's role as oppressor.
It's a simple little story, but it's visually fascinating. Many of the drones' actions are looped, perhaps to signify the near-robotic existence they live. The landscape sets are beautiful in their construction, although they paint a rather dark future society. But hey, it's Donald Fagen. Lighten up.
Snowbound is available on the 2003 audio DVD release of Kamakiriad.