AMV chronicles #57: One Day on the Island

This is probably the simplest AMV I’ve ever posted about on this blog, but it’s one I keep coming back to over the years in spite of any of technical or conceptual “flaws” that may be apparent in its presentation or structure. I probably found it in the first place during a hunt for Boards of Canada AMVs, and I won’t deny that “ROYGBIV” is probably what got me hooked on this video in the first place. But at some point between now and whenever I first downloaded it — I remember that summer where I moved back in with my parents, setting up my computer on the floor of my old bedroom and downloading this and a handful of other AMVs through the dial-up connection they never upgraded from until years later — the extremely basic structure of this video morphed from being an aspect of it that I simply tolerated to being the essential charm of the video that I loved most about it. I have watched more AMVs like this than I can even remember; videos that use a single anime, play out slowly across a handful of scenes and use very minimal editing to weave together their source material. More often than not, it’s neither entertaining nor convincing, and I don’t have a rationale for what makes any video like this work when so many others don’t. Not even in the realm of my personal taste can I explain why I’m so fond of “One Day on the Island” but have felt disappointed by so many other videos that are essentially working from the same approach. Of course, it’s my opinion that this music and this anime (which I’ve never watched aside from this video) compliment each other very fittingly, but I’m aware that’s a matter of personal taste and not an opinion that will be shared by every viewer.

What I do find very interesting is how ahead of its time this video has turned out to be. When lunasspecto edited this in 2006 — the first of a handful of AMVs — it was unlikely that they were inspired by the sort of motivations that drive AMV editors today. I’m talking about AMVs not particularly associated with the Org or conventions or contests or any of the outlets that I’m used to, but a particular scene that seems to be most active on Youtube, existing solely online and very focused on instrumental music and anime sources of a certain vintage. A track like “ROYGBIV” feels especially prescient to this world; a great deal of these kind of AMVs use vaporwave tracks or a particular kind of instrumental lo-fi hip-hop that both feel indebted to the hazy, melodic standard set by that track and other Boards of Canada tunes from almost 20 years ago.

I’m tempted to trace a line from a video like “One Day on the Island” to AMVs like this or this or this or this. For the most part, the editors of these AMVs let the action speak for itself, loosely syncing their cuts to the music and letting scenes play out without much interruption. These editors aren’t necessarily aspiring to make traditional AMVs by tying together aspects of the song with specific themes in the anime they’ve chosen, but rather, seem more concerned with simply capturing a tone that veers towards the mellow, chilled-out and reflective. The music is usually a melancholy hip-hop instrumental — though there are other branches of this school of editing that cater to other related sounds, just no rock n’ roll — and the anime on screen is often older or relatively obscure titles that convey a more timeless appeal and are softer on the eyes than most new anime. Maybe the age of these sources is less significant than the fact that they’re almost never the kind of popular shonen series that are immediately recognizable (and usually paired with aggressive rock or pop songs). While most AMV editors with bigger followings opt to work with newer or more popular anime titles — a chicken and the egg problem, I guess — the editors in this corner of Youtube take a different approach, digging into older or sometimes rare anime titles for their sources in hopes of capturing a vibe that’s immediately relatable to their audience but different than anyone else’s works in the same scene. The audience for these videos is surprisingly huge, with many editors earning four or five-figure counts of subscribers. This is a very different mindset about AMVs than we’ve had in the past and it’s one that a lot of editors and viewers are tapping into.

There’s a certain me-too approach to a lot of this stuff that keeps me at an arm’s length from truly feeling it, or the sense that it’s less a movement or a community that’s interested in anime or editing than it is in using videos as a social currency for accumulating followers and views. This is a bigger topic than I’m ready to write about any further for now, but digging into it is what lead me back to lunasspecto’s debut, reminding me what I loved about it, its simplicity and the mysterious vibe I always got from it. It’s not my favorite Boards of Canada AMV, but while an AMV like Zerophite’s “Pale Moonlight” is exactly what I want and expect from a video like that, “One Day on the Island” just kind of does its own thing and works outside of my expectations or cravings. I’ve always loved it for what it was and I feel like it never really got its due and certainly never expected that it ever would. And it probably never will, but it’s funny to see how the world’s finally caught up with it and its laid-back charms.