10 Greatest Animated Music Videos Of All Time
9. Kanye West – Heartless
It's not uncommon for animated music videos to avoid representing the artist. It makes sense: attempting to animate the person performing would be complex and time consuming.
Slapping music over something irrelevant (yet still entertaining) is fairly standard. Props has to go to the video for Kanye West's Heartless, then – releasing in 2008 from the album 808s & Heartbreak – for committing to depicting Kanye.
Despite a rather simplistic animation style, there's an appealing atmosphere to the video which matches the song well. The video was directed by Hype Williams (who is responsible for a staggering number of music videos) using rotoscoped animation. Rotoscoped animation involves the recording of actual people so that artists can draw over every frame of their movement.
Heartless sees West wander through various cityscapes, interacting with women and standing in an apartment, which is incidentally the apartment where West himself was living at the time.