Raise Your Helping Hand

Here, you will find some analyses of Music Videos and Short Films centering around mental health. Here, we can learn more from these videos and be sometimes shocked about the origin of these productions.

JaidenAnimations & BoyInABand

Empty

JaidenAnimations, a YouTuber who focuses her channel around fun animations talking about her everyday life. Releasing a face reveal video, she talked about her struggle with Anorexia and Bulimia, both eating disorders. BoyInABand, another YouTuber who creates music reached out to Jaiden to collaborate and create a song focusing around Jaiden’s struggles.

Eating disorders are one of the more serious disorders due to having the highest mortality rate of all mental disorders. According to Mirasol Recovery Center, a facility focused on helping those with eating disorders say that 5-10% anorexics die within 10 years after contracting the disease and jumps to 20% within 20 years. Jaiden’s music video is very powerful, and focuses on the inner demons telling us what we should do, that you don’t need to eat, and that the feeling of hunger is good. However, these demons are not to be trusted and with help, are able to overcome these demons.

Porter Robinson & Madeon (Short Film with A-1 Pictures & Crunchyroll)

Shelter

Created through a collaboration between an American and French record producer Porter Robinson and Madeon, the two met in their adolescent years through the internet. Partnering with animation companies A-1 Pictures and Crunchyroll, the four groups came together to create this very beautiful music video centering around the themes of trauma and isolation.

The music video focuses around a seventeen year old girl named Rin who seems to live in a simulation. She’s able to shape and control the virtual world she lives in through a single tablet within the simulation. As she draws and creates these environments, she soon finds scenes that she had not drawn. Rin begins to get overwhelmed by memories of her as a child, and has learned of her tragic past which has brought her to where she is today. This video focuses on Rin’s realization, grief, and coming of age, as the view watches her journey to overcome her trauma within the three minute and thirty nine second long music video.

Through even deeper analysis, we learn that this video doesn’t just show Rin’s trauma, but in actuality focuses on her father’s. We see how he has to overcome the loss of this wife. Throughout the video, we see that Rin continues to wait for a letter, an email, something. At the end we see a letter from her father, however, we do not know what it says. Rin continues to say

“Even if those memories makes me sad, I’ve got to go forward, believing in the future. Even when I realize my loneliness, and am about to lose all hope, those memories makes me stronger. I’m not alone… because of you. Thank you.”

While this seems like a monologue of some sorts, we can also infer that this in fact is the letter her father wrote for her as well as he overcomes his feelings of grief, and loneliness.

The Beatles

Help!

The Beatles are a famous band of the late 1900’s. They swept the nation with their top charting songs and incredible creativity. The song Help! written by their lead singer John Lennon, is a song focusing on trying to get help and calling for it. John Lennon stated that despite being commissioned to create this song, he did not realize until later that he wrote this song unintentionally as a cry for help. Back when he wrote it, he said he was fat, insecure, and had completely lost himself. Through this song, we can learn that there are many ways for people to “call for help”.

Omeleto ft. Steven Yuen

Naysayers

Omeleto is a famous YouTube channel focusing on the production of short films. Naysayers is one of those films. Starring Steven Yuen, known for his role as Glen in the famous The Walking Dead series, this short film lasts only a bit over eight minutes. This film’s entirety is taken in one take, and its entirety is filmed while Steven is driving down a freeway phoning his ex-wife. As he talks with his wife, it is revealed that he had taken their child because he was in an abusive and toxic environment with his ex-wife. The wife keeps asking where he is, and acts surprisingly calm despite what Steven is saying. In the end, what the viewer thought was the baby crying in the back of the car, was actually the baby crying on the other side of the phone, and the film ends then.

This film centers itself on mental illness. While the film is quite open ended, there are many ways to interpret the film:

Schizophrenia – The child was a figment of his hallucination that’s why even the woman on the phone is not alarmed – because the baby is not real. Yes, it showed he saw photos of a baby on his phone, but that’s what schizophrenia does, it makes you believe on things that aren’t there.

Dementia/Short term memory – He forgets that he and his wife are divorced, the baby is with her, everything. The clue was her constant asking “tell me where you are”. One of the first signs of dementia is not knowing where you are and what you were doing.