A Jailbreak Turns into a Train Heist in Anime Video from Rapper J Hus

Director Nicholas Lam has released a new fully anime music video for UK rapper J Hus (who was just nominated for four Brit Awards on his new album) featuring CB, through production company Hound. 

This is Nicholas’ second anime to-date, after his first music video was released during the pandemic. The scale and scope of this video was far larger, and so in addition to tapping Taiwan-based Point Five Creations again - the same animation studio from the previous video - Nicholas also brought in Belgrade-based Tier-S, making this a joint animation studio effort while Nicholas remotely directed and supervised with his team in Los Angeles. 

The project in total took three months, which sounds like a lot, but in the animation world, is anything but.

Nicholas obtained the blessing of Leo Chu, the creator of the Afro-Samurai animated series, to reference character design and scenes from the legendary anime as a way to pay homage to its influence on himself.

There is a concept in anime called sakuga, which refers to the idea that key action scenes are rendered in stunning levels of detail while “less important” scenes can be a bit more rough. This is chiefly attributed to allocation of time and resources. Nicholas and his animation teams strove to apply sakuga across the entire piece, so that every frame would be a beautiful work of art.

Nicholas enlisted his longtime collaborator, Denis Kilty (based out of Ireland), to create a lush, wall-to-wall SFX soundscape so that this would 100% feel like an animated TV show.

Nicholas said, “It’s a genuine blessing as a live-action director who grew up on anime to be able to bring my ideas and sensibilities to a genre that was not-too-long-ago considered the esoteric domain of nerds. It’s becoming increasingly more of a lifelong desire and professional pursuit to push Asian culture forward into the western mainstream, normalising (and popularising) so much of what was once relegated as being ‘other.’”

The only two elements in Sony Music UK’s brief was: “show a jailbreak” and “weave in a train heist.” And so Nicholas went about worldbuilding a neo-feudal cyberpunk futurist world where Samurai and Cowboys did battle under perpetual sunset or moonlight, influenced by shows like Cowboy Bebop, Demon Hunter, Afro-Samurai, BatmanNinja and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.