We’ve seen the moonwalk, the one-handed glove, the antigravity tilt, and that’s just to mention a few of the innovations introduced by the late Michael Jackson. Sometimes people even forget how MJ reinvented himself from a wunderkind to a global pop sensation. But he has this sense of creativity and showmanship that is hard to match, leading him to try a lot of things, one of which is cartoon animation for his music videos.
The Michael Jackson song “Leave Me Alone” on the 1987 album Bad highlighted 2D cartoon animation as its motif. Throughout the entire video, Jackson overlapped like a real-life character to scale.
The song talks about the personal and public upheaval that Michael encountered after the success of his 1982 album Thriller. At this time, the tabloids and other gossip columns were pointing at him with different rumors about his lifestyle. Among these was Michael’s obsession with buying the Elephant Man’s bones and sleeping inside a hyperbaric chamber to counteract the effects of aging.
The cartoon video was used by Michael Jackson as a rebuttal to all of these charges. The narrative of the video begins with an amusement park with a collage of images crediting its success, along with certain images such as a shrine to its popular friend Elizabeth Taylor (who gave him the nickname King of Pop). In the end, it is revealed that Michael Jackson is the amusement park and he fights, destroying the park in the process.
Leave Me Alone was directed by Jim Blashfield and was most notable for winning the Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video at the 1990 Grammy Awards. It was also featured in the feature film Moonwalker. Here’s the animated video for Leave Me Alone:
Michael Jackson helped popularize the use of music videos as a promotional piece and as an art form. Another of his videos that prominently used computer animation effects was Black or White, a heavily worded song that contradicted racial profiling but was best known for its scenes of violence and sexualized dancing. The most recognizable animation effect used in this video was the transformation.
Morphing is a special effect that tries to change one image to another seamlessly. The Black or White music video used this concept in the final part of the video where people of different ethnicities, genders, and ages were filmed from the point of view of a bust shot and it was made to appear to be transforming while moving their neck from from left to right. Here is the video:
This was another revolutionary touch from Michael Jackson and, along with Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991, the video helped set a trend in special effects and computer animation. Now, advanced computer software is available to create realistic simulations, but nothing will exceed that level of genius when it was first introduced by Black or White.
I’ll list some of his most special awards here as a tribute to Jacko:
Best-selling male pop artist of the millennium at the World Music Awards
American Music Award Artist of the Century
Bambi Pop Artist of the Millennium Award.
Double inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (The Jackson 5, 1997; solo, 2001)
Multiple Guinness World Records (eight in 2006 alone),
13 Grammy Awards,
13 number one singles in his solo career, more than any other male artist in the Hot 100 era
sale of more than 750 million records worldwide
Rest in peace, MJ.