“My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.”
(Watership Down)
 
The best time that you can grant to a song is always the night. If a song keep you from falling asleep or from wandering around the room, this song deserves your night.
 
It must be what the director Nir Ben Jacob thought the night he listened to ‘On the Water’, from ‘You & Me’, The Walkmen’s fourth album, a night where song’s lyrics and feel song evoked mix up themself to create the imaginative world of the videoclip.
An imaginative world that is in debt with Richard Adams’ ‘Watership Down’ (and with animated adventure drama film by Martin Rosen), a classic fantasy novel about a small group of rabbits.
 
“On the Water” is Ben Jacob’s directing debut: a winning bet. He hadn’t a contract with the label or the band, but his unsolicited submission met the Walkmen’s taste for its dramatic intensity.
 
Nir Ben Jacob developed the narrative concept, write and sketch it down in a way that amazed himself: “I figured if the idea came so quickly and naturally, it had to mean something. It hadn’t happened like that before.” he said in an interview.
 
The approach to 3D animation by Ben Jocob is minimal, not only for an economical issue, but because he reaches a very stylezed imaginative world coloured with dark blue in a limited palette and flat shading (in a way that, Ben Jacob said, was inspired by the more complex Shynola’s Go With The Flow)
The minimalistic approach succeeds to create a very intense expression of drama: with the hares, totally black but with enlightened outlines, as in the very cloudy sky, those are the very heart of the video, and in the imaginative movement the point of view. However the hunter and the multicoloured blood (and other details, like the house) haven’t the same visual vigour.
Nir Ben Jacob used himself as reference for hunter’s movements and he gave to him his own face.
Maybe because, in the end, he is the winner.