We’d already realized that animation is living through a golden moment in the world of music videos thanks to A$AP Rocky’s latest release, made in collaboration with Tim Burton. But the project that really brings us back to that idea is the latest work by Thundercat, which confirms the trend without any hesitation. In She Knows Too Much, the Los Angeles bassist and producer builds a fragmented visual journey split into six sections, each entrusted to different teams, with distinct aesthetics that are still tied together by a shared tension: pushing animation to the very edge of emotional language.
The first section, directed and animated by Joshua Clauss with additional 3D assets by Connor Ross, opens with a vibrant, tactile aesthetic, where the character design seems to move between irony and unease. Here, the animation is fluid yet deliberately unstable—warped, as if the image could collapse at any moment.
The second section shifts gears completely. Crux Studio and Mathematic build a more narrative world under the direction of Frederick Venet. With animation by Cecil Tawale and Titouan Crasson, backgrounds by Valentine Rault and Philémon Jung, and clean up by Kristina Degtyar, Loon Gallardo, Darya Butova, and Roxane Doti, the scene becomes layered and dense. The result pulls us into a completely different dimension from the first section—almost cinematic—marked by a meticulous attention to detail and colors that evoke nocturnal, pop-leaning atmospheres, driven by a very precise rhythm in the characters’ movements.
The third section, once again signed by Mathematic, focuses instead on character identity and a return to physicality. Barnabé Cantin handles character design and animation, with additional 3D assets by Remy Maatouk, Juliette Battier, and Paulin Girard. Here the mark-making is more synthetic yet extremely powerful: fewer elements, maximum impact.
With the fourth section, Turçin Soylu pushes everything toward a more graphic and abstract dimension, almost illustrative. Ines Fragueiro and Yutong Zhang amplify the motion with additional animation that seems to expand the image beyond the edges of the frame.
The fifth part, led by Lola Lefèvre with colour animation by Zofia Klamka, is a chromatic celebration. Here color doesn’t just fill space: it pulses, vibrates, and tells a story. The animation takes an unexpected turn—different, surprising, and striking.
Finally, Tom Jeanbourquin and Valentin Gaubert close the video with a section that feels like a synthesis of everything that came before. Once again, there’s the tangible physicality of stop motion, but also an evident compositional maturity. Emotions that seem to come out—literally—through the screen.
What brings us back to the beginning—and what struck us most about this project—is its modular structure. Six chapters, six visions that, in just 3 minutes and 34 seconds, give back all the emotions of the track while capturing its essence. And this feels like an increasingly common approach: animation as a collective ground, a shared laboratory, a space for experimentation and recognition.
It’s no coincidence that more and more mainstream artists are choosing similar languages. Twenty One Pilots have just released a stop-motion video, proving how hands-on craft and artisanal visuals have become central again in contemporary pop. In the same way—as we said at the start—A$AP Rocky teamed up with Tim Burton on a 2D animated project, showing just how blurred the boundary between auteur cinema and music videos has become.
With this project, animation once again proves to be the freest language available to music. It doesn’t require realism, it doesn’t have to answer to preset rules, and above all it can change style every thirty seconds. And for artists like Thundercat—who have always played with identity, irony, and transformation—it’s the perfect medium.
