The Psychedelic Animated Video for Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” from 1979

Ah, yes, “Auto­bahn.” From the moment the door slams and the igni­tion starts, prog rock­ers and pre-new wavers know a jour­ney is afoot. Though the mem­bers of Kraftwerk made three albums before this, the mem­bers still look­ing like well mean­ing book­ish hip­pies, 1974’s “Auto­bahn” is con­sid­ered Year Zero for the denizens of the elec­tric cafe, the four Ger­man robots who made human music with machines.

Cre­at­ed in 1979, but bop­ping around again in pop cul­ture orbit is this cel-drawn ani­ma­tion by Roger Main­wood, cre­at­ed to pro­mote “Auto­bahn” after most of the cul­ture had caught up. By that last year of the ’70s Omni mag­a­zine was a year old, music was sift­ing through the shock­waves left by Bowie’s Low and Heroes, ana­log was flirt­ing with dig­i­tal, and the world was ready to dri­ve on that long, elec­tric high­way.

Mainwood’s pro­tag­o­nist is part alien, part human, and he begins look­ing around in awe in his hip gog­gles, then set­ting off for a run straight out of a Muy­bridge loop, only to wind up float­ing, fly­ing, sail­ing and swim­ming through a land­scape indebt­ed to Peter Max, Push­Pin Stu­dios, under­ground comix, and 1930 mod­ernism.

Main­wood had just grad­u­at­ed from London’s Roy­al Col­lege of Art Film and Tele­vi­sion School, and was com­mis­sioned by John Halas, the Hun­gar­i­an immi­grant who became known as the Father of British Ani­ma­tion, for Kraftwerk’s record label. The label want­ed to put out one of the first music Laserdiscs. (Halas, by the way, direct­ed a very UPA-influ­enced short called “Auto­ma­nia” in 1963). Accord­ing to Main­wood, he still doesn’t know if the band liked the short or even if they watched it.

Main­wood avoid­ed any direct rep­re­sen­ta­tion of dri­ving or auto­mo­biles, much to his cred­it, which may be why the film holds its fas­ci­na­tion. The ani­ma­tor con­tin­ued in his field, wind­ing up a pro­duc­er of sev­er­al clas­sics of British ani­ma­tion, includ­ing The Snow­man and the chill­ing When the Wind Blows. As for the mean­ing of “Auto­bahn,” we’ll let Main­wood have the last word:

Think­ing back to my thought process­es at that time, I remem­ber want­i­ng to specif­i­cal­ly not have con­ven­tion­al cars in the film. I want­ed a sense of a repet­i­tive jour­ney, and alien­ation, which I took to be what the music was about…hence the soli­tary futur­is­tic fig­ure, pro­tect­ed by large gog­gles, mov­ing through and try­ing to con­nect with the jour­ney he is tak­ing. The auto­mo­bile “mon­sters” are delib­er­ate­ly threat­en­ing (I have nev­er been a big fan of cars or motor­ways!) and when our “hero” tries to make human con­tact (with dif­fer­ent coloured clones of him­self) he can nev­er do it. In the end he realis­es he is mak­ing the repet­i­tive and cir­cu­lar jour­ney alone but strides for­ward pur­pose­ful­ly at the end as he did in the begin­ning. All of which sounds rather pretentious…but I was a young thing in those days!

You can read more of an inter­view with Main­wood here.

Find more ani­ma­tions in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” Per­formed by Ger­man First Graders in Adorable Card­board Robot Out­fits

Kraftwerk’s First Con­cert: The Begin­ning of the End­less­ly Influ­en­tial Band (1970)

See the First “Drum Machine,” the Rhyth­mi­con from 1931, and the Mod­ern Drum Machines That Fol­lowed Decades Lat­er

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.


by | Permalink | Comments (6) |

Sup­port Open Cul­ture

We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here. We thank you!


Comments (6)
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
  • TimJ says:

    This great, who knew there was a car­toon for “Auto­bahn”. Very much a prod­uct of the 70s.…

  • NikFromNYC says:

    You redeem your­selves with authen­tic psy­che­delia, Open Cul­ture. Now smash Al Gore and Duchamp, nitwit Marx­ist fools. Hur­ry up, the Trump ham­mer is descend­ing.

  • Barbara wehling says:

    Remem­ber this song very well. Nev­er knew there was this video. Far Out!!

  • Bender says:

    No drugs were tak­en dur­ing the pro­duc­tion… sure.

  • DonJuan says:

    I remem­ber see­ing this as a child in the 80s. Irish tele­vi­sion used to show weird ani­ma­tion shorts as fillers before and after the six O clock news. They also used to show these weird and dis­turb­ing Pol­ish car­toons with no nar­ra­tives. For ages I used to think that Kraftwerk and Jean Michel Jarre were the same artist. There was pos­si­bly a sim­i­lar ani­ma­tion for Oxy­gen.

  • phil says:

    Hi there.

    I love your site. How­ev­er, it feels like you are long over­due for a web redesign to match your inspir­ing con­tent!

Leave a Reply

Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.