Gorillaz return to the roots of hand-drawn animation with a new short film that expands the visual and narrative universe of their upcoming album, The Mountain. The film, titled The Mountain, The Moon Cave and The Sad God, will premiere on Friday, February 27 on YouTube, ahead of the album’s release scheduled for March 20.
At a time when most animation is now fully digital, Gorillaz choose to go in the opposite direction. Made together with The Line Animation studio, the short reaffirms how drawing and art direction have always been central to the project’s identity. Since the beginning, the virtual band has built a visual universe running parallel to the music—a coherent, layered world in which every release becomes narrative, characters, and settings. With this film, the relationship between sound and image is pushed even further.
The technique seems to nod to cel animation, with characters illustrated frame by frame over hand-painted backgrounds—a method that defined the language of the great classics before the digital era. It’s an approach that isn’t just aesthetic but cultural, and here it helps create a dense, organic atmosphere. The visual imagination—between jungle, mystery, and tension—clearly recalls the look of The Jungle Book, with that sense of lush, threatening nature ready to swallow the protagonists.
The short’s title directly references three tracks from the new record, immediately suggesting a cinematic, mythological dimension. From the trailer, a dark, surreal tone emerges: “Gorillaz went looking for something, but something was looking for them, at the top of… The Mountain.” What was meant to be a dream quickly turns into a nightmare. “They wanted to make a film, but now they are the film.” No way out, no possible descent. At the top of the mountain, they find themselves at the bottom of the food chain. “Don’t climb… The Mountain. It’s a jungle out there.”
Guided once again by Damon Albarn and artist Jamie Hewlett, Gorillaz began teasing tracks from the album as early as last year. This short film makes years of visual and narrative world-building unmistakably clear: for Gorillaz, animation has never been a simple aesthetic support, but the very heart of the project—the language through which the music takes shape and turns into story.
The idea of a full-fledged Gorillaz movie has been circulating since 2021, when Albarn revealed that writing had begun on a feature film in collaboration with Netflix. The project, however, was cancelled in 2023. This new short film therefore seems to pick up its legacy, bringing the animated band back into the territory they know best: the hybrid zone between music and image, where reality and fiction blur until they become one and the same.
