Watching Run Makoto Run engages my entire fucking body. I've seen it on a phone, a laptop, a TV, and a couple massive AMV contest projector screens, and without fail it gives me chills and makes me want to scream, and I can't even identify all the emotions playing into this response. I go to bed with "SHAKE YOUR PARANOIA, CANT STOP THE ROCK" looping in my head. This is the same feeling I've gotten from the film segments (like the character introduction sequence in Magnolia or the Paranorman teaser trailer) and fan edits that inspired me to start editing for myself. So why have I been so conflicted? Why don't I jump to tout this video as a work of great art? It's because I have been plagued by the question:
Why does Makoto run?
Or: What is this video doing? Why devote hundreds of hours of your life to the creation of this video? Is it worth the AMV awards showered on it, and more importantly the hours I, and I'm sure lots of other editors and animators, have spent engaging with and thinking about it? Here are some thoughts I've had for this question, because it's become illuminating for my current perspective on what I value in artistic creation and engagement.
Makoto runs because it gets the blood pumping.
A big factor in considering Run Makoto Run's hypnosis on me is the use of Apollo 440's big beat hit "Stop the Rock". It's looping, pulsing, relentless structure is hype and probably could get me just as pumped with a much more simply edited video. But it also really is the perfect reflection of Makoto's blistering sprint, which is an astute connection to make and that sensitivity of curation does give me a base respect for this video (in a similar way that I will praise ZONE's, another talented fan content animator, great sense in using Sandy Marton's "Camel by Camel" for the memetic NSFW Ankhazone animation that I also think about a disproportionate, embarassing amount).
As a counter example, I introduce another recent massive effort AMV that similarly swept every contest it entered for a year: Hikikomori's Contemporary Dog
This video never gave me the conflict that Run Makoto Run has. There's a few reasons I've worked through with friends about why this video doesn't work for me ("contemporary dog" Ein being a less solid foundation to structure a vid on compared to Makoto's run, and also the general bluntness of its pandering, most obvious in the presence of a Fullmetal Alchemist Nina Tucker joke [complete with fanwanking wink] that remains so fucking funny the hundred billionth time anime fans repeat it). But I think the core of the problem is that Eurythmic's "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" just isn't a track that will get my gut the way "Stop the Rock" does. Without gutteral excitement, I'm left with a tour through obvious pop culture images that I am supposed to do the Leo Dicaprio point at with flashy masking and visual effects. But doesn't Run Makoto Run do that too?
Makoto runs for Forrest Gump.
The first reservation I could articulate regarding Run Makoto Run came with it's ending coda (which has been cut when I've seen it at cons sometimes), which uses shots from End of Evangelion. I've spent more time thinking about Evangelion than any other piece of media, and it hit me that there was nothing specific about it's use here that would resonate any more with someone who's deeply engaged with the franchise vs someone who just knew it's iconography through cultural osmosis (and I know Qwaqa has spent a substantial time with Eva from their ChillOut vid, which is a vid that is very funny if not quite how I most resonate with Eva being used). And that's true for every reference in it from Sonic, to Rick & Morty, to Chainsaw Man, to The Wall, to Nichijou, to Fight Club, to Isle of Dogs, to Hedgehog in the Fog (which I proved myself human and fallible by soy pointing when I saw it's respective bit) etc etc. They're not chosen with any nuanced thematic or emotional basis, only on the basis of what the most people will recognize, the same reason why Forrest Gump shows Elvis how to dance or was present at seemingly every important American event of the 20th century. And to me the real strength of AMVs and collage works in general is the ability to draw out specific sensitivities and nuanced throughlines between distinct works, so under that metric this video has as much depth as that one Big Bang Theory joke from the "they just named a bunch of shit" video. The only throughline is the loop of Makoto running, the significance of which is, what exactly? It's just a basic action shot of her running while distressed, hardly the type of emotional or iconic image to devote this ridiculous effort to.
Then I saw this blurb Qwaqa posted along with this video:
"If you think I'm crazy, then you should know the original running scene lasts for almost a minute and contains no cycles or repeated frames."
Makoto runs because she can.
That quote me serves as essential context to understanding the significance of Makoto's run. Artists and animators spending this ridiculous effort for an effect most viewers wouldn't consciously notice. The effort itself becomes the concept. So to reflect this, Qwaqa devoted an ungodly amount of time meticulously outlining detailed effects which generally only last for a few seconds each. As Morgan Freeman says at the end of Qwaqa's Visual (and mental) Breakdown video (ingeniously set to the guitar solo from "Free Bird", again showing that Qwaqa is an astute curator in addition to an absurdly talented animator), "I just wanted you to know how hard it was". And this effort I think is on the forefront of people's minds watching this video, especially with a number of the effects in the video relating to the machinations of creation (editing project files, sticky note sketches, film strips, etc). A great AMV critic whose writing I've gained a lot from named CrackTheSky wrote that this video "feels like an invitation to the creative process, getting a first-hand look at all the decisions you had to make as you were making them, pivoting from one ridiculous motif to the next". All the pop culture iconography becomes representative of the free associative thoughts you have when sitting down to create something.
It'd be easy to compare the video in this respect to the pop culture deluge of the Daicon IV opening animation, which similarly struck musical synchronicity gold through its ecstacy-inducing use of ELO's "Twilight", but something about that doesn't feel right to me. The handdrawn, rough and tumble, pre-internet verve guiding that work sets it apart from how digital and terminally online Run Makoto Run is (along with the evocative shots of nuclear explosions in Daicon IV that I'll leave to people more in-tune with the real world than me to interpret). I'd say the more direct comparison is with the absurdly technically adept Jack Black Sesame Street stop sign edits that took off in the early 2010's (one of which, entitled the 8 Awesome Angles of Youtube, was my favorite vid for a long while as a Youtube addicted teen). Was Jack Black explaining the shape of a stop sign to Elmo really that funny that you needed to create entire fucking animated worlds based around it? Maybe that's a basic human impulse though, we climb Everest because it's there, we make these crazy ass videos because fuck it, why not. But is that enough? Is running enough?
Makoto runs because maybe you will too.
I know that under my own artistic principles, the preservation of human stories and experiences in a visceral way is paramount. AMVs would seem like a weird medium to gravitate towards then in that respect, but I think music and effective montage can achieve an experiential poetry that can get you in someone's head in a very unique way. My favorite AMVs, like Koopiskeva's Twilight or Shin's Sour Diesel, tap into human stories (both using anime I've never meaningfully engaged with) in ways that resonate with me in specific and powerful ways that will stick with me far longer than I think Run Makoto Run will. And I'm fairly assured those videos took substantially less man hours to create than Run Makoto Run. And sure that's just my personal values (like Andy Morin says in an interview that's stuck with me "A value system is a highly individual thing"), but I started to question "how can anyone resonate deeply with Run Makoto Run? How can anyone look at it like 'this is deeply meaningful to me'". Then I remembered the way 8 Awesome Angles of Youtube felt to me when I was like 13, thinking "They 3D animated a stop sign butterfly? How are videos gonna get any better than THAT? And these are just some random guys on Youtube, maybe I'll make a music video one day". A very smart friend of mine said about this video: "that type of raw excitement just from seeing someone so in their bag is a contagious feeling and I think to sensitive people that will always hit. It's almost the same high as seeing someone do a hundred meter dash and just slaughtering the competition. It doesn't matter at all who wins in the grander scheme but fuck if it doesn't make you just wanna start running too".
I ended up growing away from seeing art as a foot race of effort, and now these videos seem just amusing to me instead of earth shattering. But they're still valuable, at the very least as a broadly accessible beacon for young, unformed creatives to try just a little harder. And if Qwaqa was gonna end up being some esoteric animator of uncomfortably human storytelling ala M Dot Strange or Hiroshi Harada, I'm sure it would've happened somewhere between Pencilhead and this. And besides, we have those guys already, maybe we need a Qwaqa or two to have a balanced art form. I implore people to know that that's not all there is, and if you spend enough time meaningfully engaging with any medium I think you'll find and hopefully create more personally resonant art. But I'm not gonna go around decrying this as the death of artistic sensitivity just because an accessible, exciting thing is (rightfully) popular. So run on Makoto, I may be out of step with you but maybe there's room for us both out there.
Shake my paranoia.
Can't stop the rock.
