Breakbot – Baby I'm Yours
2010 · Directed by Irina Dakeva
3.4M Likes
Best comments
1.“Little brother: *takes Dad's 'special' brownies to school* His classmates:”
More comments
- 2.“Whoever animated this is an absolute hero.”
- 3.“I don't understand how songs like this came out in 2010 and I never heard them until 2022. Makes me wonder how many other gems are out there.”
The story
More than 2,000 watercolor paintings. That's what illustrator Irina Dakeva made, one frame at a time, for this two-and-a-half-minute video. The Paris production house WIZZ spent a day filming Breakbot, singer Irfane and a friend named Sunny, and Dakeva painted over the footage by hand. The whole thing took about three and a half months.
The result looks like a sketchbook that learned to dance. A hand turns into a swan. An eye blooms into a rose. The Fader called it Xanadu-style roller disco, and that's about right: loose, bright, a little psychedelic, the paint still wobbling at the edges. The team said they wanted the drawing itself to show instead of letting a computer smooth it over. Mission accomplished.
Breakbot is French producer Thibaut Berland, and Baby I'm Yours was the title track of his 2010 EP on Ed Banger, a lovesick disco-funk plea with Irfane on vocals. It reached number 28 in France and went gold in the US. The video was nominated for Best Animation in a Video and Best Budget/Independent Video at the 2010 UK Music Video Awards, and the original drawings went on display at Colette in Paris. A paintbrush still beats a render farm.
