We
Gotta Get Out Of This Place is an animation written, directed
and animated by Phip Murray. The story is a composite fantasy largely
coloured by Phip’s own experience of growing up in the country
town of Kyneton in northern Victoria in the early 90s. A young Goth
no-hoper spends most of his evenings doing bongs with 3 mates, kicking
back VBs and watching RAGE video clips into the early morning. Becoming
tired of their hopeless recourse to stimulation, he walks outside and
dreams of getting away from Kyneton. In his imagination, a hotted-up
red Corolla drives down from the skies and parks in front of him.
He
closes his eyes and finds himself driving along the desolate landscape
in the car. A switch of his high-beams and suddenly he has entered the
realm of a video clip. His 3 mates are his band members, and he is the
rock star, pelting out a song in all the gaudy glory of the video clips
he sees all the time on RAGE. His band cuts all the requisite moves
and strikes the right poses, just as he feels wholly empowered centre-stage
in his fantasy.
The
song comes to a conclusion – but one by one the band members disappear
in thunderous flashes of lightning. Left alone, he realizes what he
must do: he levitates and floats skyward, sailing above the ruined farmhouses
and burnt tree stumps. Ending in the fantasy realm rather than returning
to any originating reality, he has achieved his dream to get out of
that place.
Philippa’s
animation is superficially a video clip. More fundamentally, it is in
the tradition of utopian Hollywood musicals, where the act of singing
and performing grants someone the power and means to carry out actions
and achieve results, While many video clips – particularly throughout
the 80s – referenced classic Hollywood musicals in this way, Philippa’s
animation reverses this to create an animated musical posing as a video
clip.
