Written by Michael Park

Electro-masters from the Clan Analogue mob, Telemetry Orchestra have teamed up with fx-masters Animal Logic in translating “Under the Cherry Tree” into a sweet love story with a nostalgic pop-up book animation look.

A boy and girl are stuck on trains in seemingly parallel worlds. Given the rollicking psychedelic travelogue of the T.O. experience, this is an ideal mise-en-scene for such an aural adventure.

Visually, it’s a seamless blend of 2D and 3D animation, like a traditional 2-dimensional animation within a 3-dimensional world. The look is quite stunningly new yet yearning with nostalgia and innocence.

The characters feel like Indonesian shadow-puppets – sad and graceful. The train is reminiscent of something out of a Studio Gibli film – retro but caught in a fantasy world that could be in the future. And the butterflies are also dripping with the magic of Hayao Miyazaki – where else would you find homing-butterflies being used to deliver messages of lost love?

In an era when computer-generated imagery is replicating reality with diminishing differences, it’s refreshing to see this technology applied with an old-skool aesthetic. The 3-D replications processed by the various software packages are as soulless as they are perfect. It is imperfection that lends character, chaos that engenders drama – people relate to imperfection and chaos because we live in a flawed and random universe. The time is still to come when the universe can be translated into a binary matrix. Even if it does, there will always be a margin for error.

A sweet music-video that explores the emotional terrain of the tune, its hand-drawn aesthetic, watercolour backgrounds and sweeping camera-direction succinctly captures Telemetry Orchestra’s fusion of analogue and digital soundscapes.

M.C.S. Park
15/04/2007