Radiohead had at least three great videos for songs from their last album, and for the new one they hope to have 12. No one can be surprised they have made a great start, but they have defied expectations again with Paranoid Android: a six-and-a-half-minute animation from Sweden, by a director with almost no experience of promos. And no Radiohead.
But as Parlophone commissioner Dilly Gent says, “The whole idea was for the visuals to be low-key and more experimental.” And singer Thom Yorke wanted animation to be a substantial part of the whole project from the start. As for Paranoid Android, Gent describes the song as humourous, presumably referring to the ironic nature of its complex, movementlike structure. “So we didn’t want any pretentious bollocks,” she says. “Thom said that when we put the reel on we would both know and say ‘Yes. And in one of our six-hour meetings trying to find a director, it happened with Magnus.”
Gent had seen a few of Magnus Carlsson’s Robin films at a film club some time before. Now they are being shown on Channel 4 and around the world: the urban and surreal adventures of a sensitive young student-slacker type. “We made about 30 three-minute episodes last year,” says Carlsson, who also finds time for other work. His methodology, on receiving the commission was: “trying not to listen to the lyrics. Then the basic themes came out. On the bridge, and in the bar...”
Some familiar themes for Robin cartoons also emerged: inter-generational conflict, drinking, sexual content, and a part where Robin takes a taxi to the countryside with his best pal in order to undertake some bizarre activity - in this case, have a woman climb down from a tree and flash her breasts at them, for money.
This more or less starts the video, meanwhile, cutting to a fat politician at an international conference. As the song gathers steam, the characters come together in a bar where things get really surreal. Robin is humiliated after he spills his drink over someone, and Radiohead seem to make a cameo of a drunken dancer with a head in his stomach.
As the song goes totally Bohemian Rhapsody, both Robin and the fat politician, both profoundly depressed, head for the bridge. Robin sits on top of a streetlamp. The fat man strips to his studded leather thong in order to chop him down, not realising Robin has gone off with an angel in a helicopter for a game of ping-pong.
“The good thing about the song is that it’s very filmic in structure,” says Carlsson. “There are three or four different songs there, more or less, with different tempos and different characters.” It makes for a great sequence with, as Yorke wails away, the fat man chopping ever more pointlessly at the metal lamp. The part where he gets tired, pulls it together then loses it completely (and chops himself up in the process) is brilliantly directed.
“We work with traditional cel animation, then we scan it and colour it on computer, and edit on digital tape,” explains Carlsson. The whole job took five weeks, and Carlsson and the Wegeleus animation team were left to it by Radiohead and Parlophone. “The funny thing is that Marcus didn’t know Thom wrote the song after he’s spilled a drink over someone who got really angry, but he put a very similar scene in the video,” says Dilly Gent.
But people will see Robin as a very Yorke-like character. “I think you like Robin because he actually doesn’t do anything. He’s like a camera going around the world and stuff happens to him,” says Carlsson, who’s developing a half-hour Robin series. “He lives in a recognisable world, whether its Stockholm, London or New York. There’s something universal about him.”

PRODUCTION: Wegelius Animation; director: Magnus Carlsson; exec. producer: Peter Piodor Gustafsson; prod. manager: Petra Sellden; line producer: Fredrik Zander, asst: Lovisa Lesse; head of animation: Jonas Dahibeck; prod. manager animation: Anna Liljefors Bortas; animation: Sara Petersson, Jessica Lauren, Jonas Odell, Virgilius Sepetys, Jan Gustavsson, Adam Bergholm, Maria Petterson; ink & paint: Eva Dorm
COMMISSIONER: Dilly Gent at Parlophone