Maybe some of you still were not even on parents’ mind when the now-forgotten cartoon ‘La linea’ was created by the Italian cartoonist Osvaldo Cavandoli in ’70, where Mr. Linea, a character/silhouette drawn as a single outline, walks on an infinite line and encounters different obstacles against which he’s helped by the live-action hand of the cartoonist himself, holding a pencil.
 
Maybe it’s forgotten by a great number of people, but it is surely well known by the production company Partizan, and duo-director Alex & Martin that took the idea to create Jamiroquai‘s first ever animated musical video.
They inspired to this idea, the characters and the inventive solutions and they carry all these thing to the next level: a wider social-political background: from hate to violence caused by men.
 
“The idea was to express the words behind his song: man and nature, corruption, war, racism and how one problem leads to another” says Martin.
 
They reach another level also in a technological way, compared to the original inspiration (30 years are passed!): the monochrome 2D line drawn backgrounds are still there, more refined, thanks to modern softwares and it is mixed with a multicoloured 3D characters (who look like a modern 3D version of Mr.Linea) even Jay Kay looks like one of those, who moves thanks to the use of caption sensors that were placed all over the real Jay Kay’s body.
 
Seven weeks was the time that took to finished the video using software like Maya for modeling together with the open API RenderMan (by Pixar) and the now discontinued Shake (by Apple) for compositing.

Line at war!