Sunshine Revival Challenge #2
Jul. 10th, 2025 02:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elyusion
I love music. I play it as often as I can. I wear my earphones basically 24/7 outside of my room, on music tracking sites they note how much more I listen to music than the average person, I don't watch YouTube videos of people talking because it irks me that I could just read whatever they want to say while I get to keep my music on, and even within a culture that loves music I thought that I felt music more deeply than others when I was very little. (I now think that's probably not true, not because I have proof of otherwise, but because I'm less self-centered and "the world revolves around meeeeee"-brained than I was when I was 7. Hopefully.)
I also love animation. It's cool when someone can draw well, but you know what's cooler? When someone can make dozens or hundreds of drawings that, when seen in rapid succession, imitate movement. It takes a lot of patience and skill, and I always found it more appealing than live action. And when I thought anime was the coolest thing on earth, naturally my love for the art form quadrupled.
Now imagine... what if... some sicko combined music AND animation and created some kind of animated music video...
You're right. That would be really weird. Thank GOD no one's done it before.
I'm sorry you have to find out this way, but that kind of thing is real. And I would know, because I know hundreds of them! I
Firstly, Vocaloid MVs. If you don't know what Vocaloid is: Imagine a keyboard. Now imagine that keyboard has a key for every sound in a language. Now imagine you can change the pitch of those keys with one of the buttons on the keyboard or something. And now imagine that if you play them in the right order, it sounds kind of like a person singing. But that's not all! Now imagine the box for said keyboard had a cute cartoon character on it, implying that said cartoon character is the personification of that keyboard. That's Vocaloid! It's a vocal synth program for computers! Producers made songs with these virtual singers, and sometimes (officially or not) others would make videos to go with said songs. And me? I spent a LOT of time watching them.
These are about ~4 minutes long, on average.
This is the first Vocaloid song I ever heard and saw, so you can imagine how it makes me feel. A friend on KW shared it, and I was like what the fuck, why doesn't this have 1000000000000 views, this is the greatest bestest awesomest thing on Earth ever. Looking at the upload date for this video, it's highly likely I was one of the first thousand views. I didn't know back then that the original upload already had a lot of views, though. :P
I got a Blackberry phone for my 12th birthday. I vividly remember going to this video on my phone, letting my home internet load as much of the video as possible ahead of time, and then enjoying about 2? minutes of it during the car ride to school. Absolute MV addict. (I've also enjoyed bad/sad endings for a long time, clearly.)
When I first heard this song about desiring an unattainable ideal of a man and nothing less, I was like "meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee," but now both me and OSTER project identify as gay, so. Yea. Says a lot about society.
...
So despite how long I've enjoyed anime, I've watched fewer than you may expect yet know more than I should because of... opening sequences!! And ending sequences, to an extent. I would spend as much time watching the same openings and endings on loop as one would watching a 12 episode show. To achieve peak nostalgia levels I'm only including openings I loved for anime I actually did watch, though.
Anime openings are normally about a minute and 30 seconds long, if you're wondering.
What can I even say about this opening except 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥?? Actually changed the game for me. It informed so much of my current taste in retrospect. Nothing I could say would do my feelings justice, but it's my favorite video of all the videos in this post.
Despite this being on Crunchyroll, I feel like I'm the only one on this side of the globe who watched this show. Whatever, not like I remember the plot well anyways. I remember the cute openings better than anything. I was originally going to put Splash Free in this spot, but that felt like low-hanging fruit. Everyone knows that one. This is a good one for showing the appeal of animation, I think. The movements they do here wouldn't look as cute in real life.
I had every CCS opening and ending on repeat, but I chose this one for the post because it's probably the cutest one? By a very thin margin -- every OP and ED is cute. Anyways, in my middle school we had iPads, and during class I would watch CCS instead of pay attention to the lesson, which may or may not have affected my grades. I regret nothing. This meant the people behind me were watching CCS too by virtue of being curious/nosy, and once I finished Cardcaptor Sakura (1998) and started watching something newer that I can't remember, a classmate told me he was surprised not all anime was so crusty. (The grain is the best part of an older anime, by the way. Love me some grain.)
Finally, I'd be remiss to not mention Flipnote... Flipnotes are about 30 seconds long, usually. They also tend to not give a fuck about photosensitive people, so watch out for that. This Ib one with Domino Toppling (Scop ft. Hatsune Miku) was a fave despite me not playing and still not having played Ib, and this one is still fun to look at. Actually I'll go ahead and link this one too because I still sing it to this day and get told to shut up for it every time. I hope the sense of humor here ages you by an extra 10 years (>ᴗ•) !
These are all videos I'm deeply nostalgic about -- which is funny because the time I watched these almost certainly were NOT better days for me -- but I'm still the same with different videos. At any given time there's some animated MV I'm obsessed with and watching on loop. There's things I watched all the time that wouldn't fit in this post, like some funny videos or MVs with real people dancing or even Silly Symphonies and Merrie Melodies, but I definitely watched anime-style MVs the most. Knowing all this, I'd probably looooooooove TikTok, particularly the animation community there. I'd love it so much. Which is exactly why I can't ever use it. I hope you understand! Glad I had an excuse to drop a bunch of videos I love.
