Francesca Colombara’s Music Video For ‘I Gotta Cry’ Is A Saturated Pastel Dream

Italian animator and illustrator Francesca Colombara holds the key to a great music video: total integration.

Colombara’s updated psychedelic pop art visuals build on the hazy tone of “I Gotta Cry,” a groovy, cotton-eared song by Berlin hip-hop artist Klaus Layer (under alias Rick Flair). When packaged together, the song and animation evoke Jeff Hale’s animated segments from Sesame Street in the mid-1970s (perhaps most famously, the Pinball Number Count segments).

Colombara and animator Matteo Dang Minh’s visuals are a faux-vintage fantasy, riding a sample-driven soundtrack out of the past and into a saturated pastel dream. Colombara, who’s done idents for FX Networks and written a graphic novel about the first three months of the pandemic in Italy, has created a magical land of absurd characters in the middle of a loosely-palpable adventure. And yes, some (happy) tears are shed.

The video was produced through Colombara and Dang Minh’s Ciang Studio.