550https://i.ur.com/uSjYVMD.png There is nothing wrong with your monitor or screen quality it really does in fact look like this If you were to focus on rock n roll the 1960s and 70s were a rather peculiar and fascinating period of popular music history. Those in the genre seemed more determined than ever to prove that rock could move beyond simply dropping vinyl on the record player and instead make statements about something be it art concerning the world atlarge or about the artist themselves. The Beatles had Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band which took the crazed musical ideas of Revolver and pushed it into a new dimension for studio work Pink Floyd had The Wall and its commentary biting everything it could sink its teeth into and The Who had Tommy dealing with the central characters trauma. In that spirit Queens Bohemian Rhapsody is right at home. It used six minutes to tell a story that seemed almost too epic and fantastically strange for rock that was anything but a little silhouetteo of a song with a structure of disparate parts that both relished in their dissimilarity and somehow coalesced into a hydra of musical power. Even now Freddie Mercury wrote and Queen performed a song that has aged remarkably well both as a standalone track and as the eventual music video. Which perhaps makes it all the more mystifyingly tragic that the anime MV version of Bohemian Rhapsody is such a void of any creative verve. Upon first watch I had to ask if there was something I was just fundamentally missing did I have to indulge in a vortex of works by Leiji Matsumoto 19382023 in order to glean some kind of underlying purpose to it all? Even several other rewatches afforded me nothing I could grasp onto solidly. According to Anime News Networks article https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/20091122/leijimatsumotoanimatesmusicvideoforu.k.squeen it borrows elements from Out of Galaxy Koshika. Given the difficulty curve in getting access to the manga nowadays you can trace the generalized outline https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/20090313/leijimatsumototodebutkoshikamangaonwiiinjapan of Out of Galaxy Koshika through other means especially since it seems the plan for an anime adaptation https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/20090421/matsumotokoshikahasanimeiphonemangaplanned never really panned out. In terms of precedent Matsumoto had previously collaborated with Daft Punk and Toei to create the unusualbutfascinating Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystemhttps://anilist.co/anime/731/Interstella5555THE5TORYOFTHE5ECRET5TAR5YSTEM/ so one could try to find parallels between them as either narratives or parts of some larger canon. Id argue though that wondering about any correlation is moot because in the end nothing really matters. All that remains is an animation that seemed to so fundamentally miss the point of why people have flocked to the original song and will continue to do so until the sun goes out. 550https://i.ur.com/bbE3HE2.png 550https://i.ur.com/m5zVTYx.png Scant cuts like these are the only notable moments in which the MV overtly calls back to the original Queen music video. Constantly making visual reference is not necessary but the lack of visual reference in this MV is itself an unintentional reflection of a lack of tonal or thematic reference for this project Thats not to say that director Inagaki Takayukihttps://anidb.net/creator/8114 had no narrative in Bohemian Rhapsody because there definitely is something here. The little bit of the plot that can be gleaned pertains to a window washer managing to make his way into a spaceship headed by someone who looks suspiciously like him and two blondehaired women. Some harmonic resonance happens with some necklaces and reality seems to split. Cloning or at the very least meeting clones is a thing that the characters are shocked by I say shocked but given their reaction its more of a Thats weird response as each encounters a doppelgnger at some point. It results in an inexplicable space battle during the hard rock section with ships that look remarkably like Zentraedi spaceships from Macross. It all culminates with an evasion and escape with the characters two of the doppelgngers apparently didnt stick around standing in a flowery field looking back on Earth paralleling the flowery field from the start of the video. I guess its a new beginning but I couldnt tell you what for. 550https://i.ur.com/WKf1LLl.png The MV is saturated with horrible compositing as things feel unnecessarily fuzzy throughout the entire venture. It obstructs Matsumotos character designs all of which look better than what the compositing would suggest I entertained the idea that there is perhaps no overarching narrative and its just supposed to be a creative indulgence maybe atmost being a Just gotta get outta here feeling hence the ship with our main characters flying away. That would parse were it not for the MVs inability to utilize the original song in a meaningful capacity. The sheer dynamicism of Bohemian Rhapsodys scope is too vast to cater to any one singular idea. It is melancholic angry brooding and panicked all the while it manages to maintain a kind of bizarre satisfyingly cathartic magnetism. Being able to switch between its emotional states not just by the section but by the moment is a prime feature. The MVs route is to take all these ideas and condense them to watereddown tableau and emotions times where the music soars are met with visual stillness or movement that feels woefully insubstantial and begging to be more than it is. Even at times where there is an alignment between the songs emotional intensity and the concept behind what the animation is doing there is a lack of reckless abandon as though its trying to be subtle when the song relishes in wearing its emotions on its sleeves. If Inagaki was going purely by what the melody did and never bothered to consider the words which would in and of itself be a huge mistake for most MVs then his musical instincts that translate to visual aesthetics leave much to be desired. This lack of insight even if the visuals were cleaned up makes this a Bohemian Rhapsody trojan horse it might sound like the song but it does not feel like the song and thats a major difference. There is so little of anything that any orientation point seems like it was lost among the stars. 550https://i.ur.com/hszdeKp.png The characters in the MV are reduced to little more than just standing around and occasionally moving often in ways that are wildly antithetical to what the music itself is doing I suppose what Ive been dancing around could be explained more simply as such the cardinal sin of the MV is that it relies almost entirely on the original Bohemian Rhapsody to do the heavy lifting contributing nothing meaningful to call its own. There is no overarching thing to latch onto with this aside perhaps from Matusmotos name and the viewerlisteners own familiarity with the song. My objection is not that it isnt a literal depiction of the lyrics rather its that its not really anything. In a certain sense there could be no greater insult to the songs legacy than to essentially mooch off its marquee value in exchange for less than what the song itself promises. There is nothing grand within Bohemian Rhapsody in terms of either content or ambition however one feels about the song itself the MV is the original songs antithesis in just about every sense of the word. It has no passion and no blood. I sometimes wish it had never been born at all. https://www..com/watch?v=9lOFBpaOLNc This is the best visual quality version that I could find but the uploader never said where they got the video in this resolution from since every other upload I gathered is the visual mess I screencapped before. One of the ANN articles I linked before says that the MV was originally shown on the eighteenth anniversary of Freddie Mercurys death in Tokyo and Osaka and then would eventually be distributed among Japanese mobile phone websites. This leads me to suspect one of three things: that the uploader either somehow got their hands on the original version shown on the anniversary highly unlikely they artificially upscaled and cleaned it or they somehow got it from those websites while avoiding compression or resolution issues. Regardless polishing the visuals really does not fix the fundamentally broken nature of everything else.