Exclusive Video Premiere: ‘Run,’ Jonquil

A secret: we are suckers for stop motion films; blame Willis O’Brien’s King Kong (1933) or The Nightmare Before Christmas.  It is this technique that first attracted us to the above Jonquil video, “Run,” the band’s most recent single off of their album, Point of Go. “[‘Run’] is our most concentrated attempt at a pop song,” Sam Scott told us. Stop-motion might not be the first technique that comes to mind when you hear the words “pop video,” but clear your mind of Britney and think “mild indie-pop.”

Directed by Maximilla Lukacs, the video begins with colored balls of different shapes and sizes rearranged perfectly in time with the music. A simplified Kandinsky abstract painting—not a description we expected to apply to a band that just finished touring with Snow Patrol.  In its entirety, the video feels a bit like a silent-film fairy tale. The protagonist is an “odd looking” girl, dressed in black with a white collar, dark red-black lipstick, pencil-thin eyebrows and a black bob. She rests her head on the table and is transported into fairyland (well, a patch of woods with some colored smoke and an oh-so-symbolic red apple-like ball) by a kaleidoscope of images. “There is a very childlike joy expressed in the song, so I love the idea of a very simple narrative based on shapes and colors and free association,” Lukacs explains.

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