Bohemian Rhapsody
a review by ZNote
a review by ZNote
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 at-large or about the artist themselves. The Beatles had Sgt. Pepper’s 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 character’s trauma. In that spirit, Queen’s “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 silhouette-o 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 (1938-2023) 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 Network’s article]( https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2009-11-22/leiji-matsumoto-animates-music-video-for-u.k.s-queen), 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/2009-03-13/leiji-matsumoto-to-debut-koshika-manga-on-wii-in-japan) of Out of Galaxy Koshika through other means, especially since it [seems the plan for an anime adaptation]( https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2009-04-21/matsumoto-koshika-has-anime-iphone-manga-planned) never really panned out. In terms of precedent, Matsumoto had previously collaborated with Daft Punk and Toei to create the unusual-but-fascinating Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, so one could try to find parallels between them as either narratives or parts of some larger canon. I’d 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.
That’s not to say that director Inagaki Takayuki 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 blonde-haired 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, it’s more of a “That’s weird” response), as each encounters a doppelgänger 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 doppelgängers apparently didn’t stick around) standing in a flowery field looking back on Earth, paralleling the flowery field from the start of the video. I guess it’s a new beginning, but I couldn’t tell you what for.
I entertained the idea that there is perhaps no overarching narrative and it’s just supposed to be a creative indulgence, maybe at-most 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 MV’s inability to utilize the original song in a meaningful capacity. The sheer dynamicism of “Bohemian Rhapsody’s” 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 MV’s route is to take all these ideas and condense them to watered-down 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 song’s emotional intensity and the concept behind what the animation is doing, there is a lack of reckless abandon, as though it’s 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 that’s a major difference. There is so little of anything that any orientation point seems like it was lost among the stars.
I suppose what I’ve 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 Matusmoto’s name and the viewer-listener’s own familiarity with the song. My objection is not that it isn't a literal depiction of the lyrics; rather, it's that it's not really anything. In a certain sense, there could be no greater insult to the song’s 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 song’s 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.
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