On Your Mark

"On Your Mark" is a song by the Japanese rock duo Chage & Aska. At their request, animator Hayao Miyazaki produced a music video for the song. The music video was created in 1995, is entirely animated, has no dialogue and runs for six and a half minutes. The song was used in advertisements for NEC. The narrative is told in a nonlinear fashion. This is likely inspired by the lyrics. As the song describes, the two men do not give up in their efforts to rescue the winged girl, no matter how many times they fail. The video begins with shots of a peaceful but vacant village, overgrown with... weeds, with the enormous concrete sarcophagus of a covered-over nuclear reactor in the background. As the music begins, the scene changes to a sci-fi style nighttime military-style police raid on a cult. Futuristic flying troop transports crash through the windows of a tower topped by the gigantic neon-lit eyes and occupied by armed defenders. Anti-terrorist policemen exchange gunfire and grenades with cultists whose hoods depict an enormous eye, similar to those of the Dorok priests in Miyazaki's Nausicaa manga.
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