by Toussaint Egan

Earlier this month, actor-model-rapper ASAP Rocky released his long-awaited fourth album Don't Be Dumb, his first in nearly eight years. While I haven't had the opportunity (or really, the interest) to listen to it, it appears to have been pretty well-received by all accounts; with mixed-to-favorable reviews courtesy of publications like Pitchfork, Consequence, and Rolling Stone. Now, this is the part of the opening paragraph where you go, "why the hell are you talking about an album you haven't listened to on an animation newsletter," to which I curtly reply, "Hold on, I'm getting to my point."

On January 19th, the release date of Don't Be Dumb, a promotional music video for the album was uploaded to ASAP Rocky's YouTube channel. Co-directed by Rocky, Kyle Zemborain, and Rocky's AWGE collective (Don't ask me what that stands for; no-one knows), Whiskey/Black DeMarco stars none other than Frankenweenie director Tim Burton, sitting at a bar while drawing all kinds of kooky characters in his sketchbook. After falling asleep, Burton's six creations — commissioned by Rocky for the cover art and promotion of the album, each representing a different "chapter" in the rapper's life and career — promptly burst from their pages Cool World-style and wreaking all kinds of mischief and havoc. The arguable centerpiece of the video occurs at the 1:33 mark, with Rocky's chaotic cartoon alter egos piling into a toy truck and proceeding to careen through streets, subways, and bodegas of New York City.

Several thoughts occurred to me while watching Whiskey/Black DeMarco, such as, "It's kind of gauche to replicate Vincent Price's voice using AI for the sake of an album rollout," and, "Tim Burton's a lot older than I thought he was." The most pertinent of these thoughts, however, was this, "This is kind of cool, but why do I feel like I've seen this before somewhere?" Deploying some carefully worded Google-fu, I managed to track down the original work in question: The 2015 animated short film Amaro & Walden's Joyride.

Directed by Tim McCourt and Max Taylor, two of the six cofounders of the London-based animation studio The Line (who we've previously featured), the short centers on two rowdy racer-hipster boys from Camden doing what they do best: getting up to trouble and generally causing a ruckus. Filmed as a faux-music video with an original track composed by Hugo Chegwin (The Curse, People Just Do Nothing) and Fred Berry, the short feels like the latter half of Rocky's own music video, albeit notably more anarchic, creative, and charming.

Everything Whiskey/Black DeMarco does, Amaro & Walden's Joyride does one better; With mounted close-up shots of the duo's remote control doing donuts in gravel pits, popping wheelies across slick asphalt, and cleverly bypassing subway fares on their merry jaunt about town getting up to 'lil hoodlum shit. There's even a sick-ass fisheye lens shot at the beginning. Neat!

I wasn't the only one who spotted the resemblance, with one recent YouTube comment in particular aptly summing the situation up as: "asap rocky just copied this bar for bar in his new music video." The old saying goes that imitation is the highest form of flattery, but this damn near feels like the animation equivalent of taking a perfectly good Jack and Coke and dousing it with seltzer water. 

It turns out this last May marked the tenth anniversary of Amaro & Walden's Joyride, with McCourt (who in the decade since has co-directed Gorillaz's 2017 music video Humility and worked as an animator on the band's audio-visual album Sound Machine) stating in an instagram post his interest to do more with the characters in the year ahead after such a prolonged hiatus, with there even being talks of pitching the concept as an animated series!

In any case, here's hoping we see more from these troublemakers in the not-too-distant future. If you're hungry for more of Amaro & Walden's shenanigans, be sure to check out this 46-second follow-up short from 2019. Two words: gentrification.