Pharrell Williams and Japanese “superflat” artist Takashi Murakami have been friends and collaborators for some time now. They even worked together on a $2 million sculpture prominently featuring a bejeweled Pepsi can. Now, in honor of Murakami’s forthcoming feature film Jellyfish Eyes, the two come together again in an animated music video for a song sung by a famous humanoid persona named Hatsune Miku — she’s a vocal synthesizer, basically, with the body of an anime star.
According to the Creators’ Project, where the video for the team-up premiered today, Murakami approached Pharrell for a remix of the film’s Livetune-composed theme song “Last Night, Good Night,” which supplants the original’s alien emoting with a futuristic Neptunes-y groove. It’s one of the weirdest things Pharrell has been involved with as of late (and he’s been involved with a lot), but musically it feels far more of a piece with the rest of his career than the songs he’s been trotting out on the Grammys and SNL.
Of course, the duo’s collaboration wasn’t merely musical. Murakami, for his part, set about creating an anime version of Pharrell (replete with a cartoon hat!) who dances through space with characters from Jellyfish Eyes and the fictional “singer” of the song. The whole thing is pretty out there, and you can experience it in full above.
