Over the past few decades the music video has emerged as a troubled art form, struggling to keep one foot in artistry and the other in marketing, since the ultimate goal of any music video is to sell a product in another medium. As a result, there’s a pretty big dichotomy between “Great” music videos, which either manage to stand on their own as a short film or are at least inventive enough from a technical perspective to warrant special consideration, and those videos that essentially show the band playing a song, usually while staring right at the camera or just dancing (although with a little ingenuity, even those music videos can also be great).

Music videos have also of course been a spawning ground for great motion picture directors, from David Fincher to Spike Jonze, from Antoine Fuqua to Mark Romanek, and many many more. But in the first installment of The Great Music Videos (which are numbered in order of publication, not necessarily quality or historical significance – so don’t read too much into that “#1″) I would like to call attention to a video directed by an already great motion picture director, who directed a beautiful animated video for the song “On Your Mark” by the Japanese rock duo Chage & Aska. I am of course referring to the Academy Award-winning animation legend Hayao Miyazaki. (Please feel free to leave suggestions for future music videos in the Comments section below.)

Commentary to follow after the video:

The story is partly inspired by the Chernobyl incident in 1986, and takes place in a future in which society lives within a tall structure to protect the citizens from the highly irradiated outlying areas. At the start of the tale, two characters inspired visually by Chage and Aska are members of a police unit violently quelling a religious cult that appears to have been taking part in mass ritualistic suicide. Among the corpses there remains one survivor… a young girl with angelic wings. Over the course of the rest of the video, Chage and Aska become obsessed with helping the girl – who is immediately whisked away by government types in radiation suits – to escape the confines of the city.

The music video is of course gorgeously animated by Studio Ghibli but is pretty remarkable in its non-linear structure. Chage and Aska’s attempts to rescue the girl on at least one occasion lead to their deaths, but they keep trying anyway until they succeed. Like the popular German film Run Lola Run, the only explanation provided for this development is the characters’ unflinching determination to get this one thing right. The religious angle to the story might help motivate the narrative device as well – the sign outside the cult complex reads “God is Watching You,” implying that a higher power may be manipulating the events to his/her/its liking – but then again perhaps not. The music video provides no easy answers and the fact that the girl is being kept in a room filled with radiation protection seems to imply that she is a biological mutation brought about through “natural” means in the nuclear wasteland to which the heroes are simply trying to return her.

“On Your Mark” ends on a hopeful note, with our characters successfully free of the confines of the city and teaching the young “angel” how to fly. The exterior of the city is filled with signs indicating high levels of radiation and warnings like “Beware of Sunlight” and “Survival Not Guaranteed” (in kanji), but also with enough lush vegetation to imply that the danger may have passed long ago and that society has been living in entirely self-imposed quarantine for an undetermined amount of time. On the other hand, maybe Chage, Aska and the angel really did die halfway through the music video, and the happy ending is a mere fantasy or possibly, since God is watching them, their idea of heaven.

The music video has a few oblique references to Miyazaki’s feature film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, but “On Your Mark’s” relationship to that film’s story (if any) is once again left to speculation. One more interesting point of interest is that the wide shot panning across the plains with a tall (yet stout) futuristic tower looming in the horizon behind them was cribbed pretty shamelessly in a prominent shot from J.J. Abrams’ recent, acclaimed motion picture Star Trek.

The song may not be to everyone’s liking but “On Your Mark” represents some beautiful and daring filmmaking from a master director at the top of his game, working closely within the confines of the music video genre. And it is my pick for one of the greats.