On Your Mark (music video)

Synopsis

The video opens with shots of a vacant village overgrown with weeds and a concrete sarcophagus covering a nuclear reactor. The scene shifts to a nighttime military-style police raid on a cult in a tower topped with gigantic neon-lit eyes. Armed policemen exchange gunfire and grenades with hooded cultists. After the raid, two policemen find an unconscious girl with large feathered wings.

The scene cuts to bright daylight: two men drive an old Alfa Romeo Giulietta Spider down an empty road. One man helps the girl up; she spreads her wings, and he holds her hands as she gains confidence. With a nudge she becomes airborne but seems hesitant. The scene returns to the tower, revealing the two men are the same policemen.

They carefully carry the girl out and offer her a drink. Scientists in radiation suits arrive and take her away. Haunted by her fate, the two men formulate a rescue plan. They break into the laboratory and free her, triggering alarms.

The three escape in an armored truck along a narrow suspended roadway over a domed city in a crater. Police hovercraft pursue; one blocks the roadway, causing it to collapse. The truck plummets, and the winged girl refuses to let go of her rescuers as they fall into the abyss.

Production

Miyazaki began production of the music video while suffering from writer's block on Princess Mononoke. He wrote and directed it for the song "On Your Mark", which had been released in 1994 as part of the single "Heart". Studio Ghibli did not give "100 percent" focus to the project, according to Toshio Suzuki. Miyazaki experimented with computer animation to supplement traditional hand-drawn cel-animation; the work was outsourced to CG Production Company Links under supervision of Hideki Nakano, using Silicon Graphics, Softimage 3D, and Alias Research. Techniques learned were later adopted for Princess Mononoke. Masashi Andō served as animation director, Michiyo Yasuda handled color selection, Kazuo Oga created backgrounds, and Yōji Takeshige made his debut as art director. The two policemen were loosely modeled after Chage and Aska.

Analysis

Miyazaki described the angelic figure in the video as representing "Hope," and noted that protecting hope might paradoxically require letting it go somewhere unreachable. He explained that the setting places humans in an underground city after the Earth's surface became contaminated with radiation, which allowed nature to thrive above. However, he doubted this scenario, believing humanity would instead suffer on the surface. He deliberately reinterpreted the song's lyrics to explore a world plagued by disease and radiation, along with how people respond to it.

He suggested that the two policemen might not return to their former lives, though he gave no explanation. He called the winged creature "tori no hito," or "a bird's person," a nickname for Nausicaä from his own manga and film. In a 1999 lecture at the University of Dallas, Pamela Gossin and Marc Hairston connected the video to the Nausicaä story, viewing the release of the winged girl as Miyazaki freeing his character, similar to Prospero releasing Ariel in Shakespeare's The Tempest.

The final Nausicaä manga volume came out in January 1995, and Miyazaki began work on On Your Mark that same month. Helen McCarthy pointed out parallels to Akira, Blade Runner, and the Aum Shinrikyo movement, though Nausicaa.net noted the video was produced before the police raid following the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack. She also observed that the scientists' decontamination suits resemble the hero of Porco Rosso, the rescue scene echoes Princess Leia in Star Wars, and the concrete-encased structure references the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

Releases

The music video for "On Your Mark" premiered in theaters alongside Whisper of the Heart on July 15, 1995. Chage and Aska incorporated the film into their concerts, with the first official showing happening at a fan club event on June 29, 1995, at the Makuhari Messe in Chiba. Starting July 5, 1995, the video was played during performances of the song on the Super Best 3 Mission Impossible tour. An English-language version called "Castles in the Air" shares the same melody but has different lyrics; it appeared on the album One Voice: The Songs of Chage & Aska.

The video aired on Channel 4 as part of the program Four-Mations on April 10, 1996. Due to popular demand, it was released on VHS and Laserdisc by Pony Canyon on July 25, 1997. On November 15, 2005, it was included on Buena Vista Home Entertainment's Ghibli ga Ippai Special Short Short DVD, where viewers could choose between the original "On Your Mark" or "Castles in the Air" as the soundtrack. The video was originally slated for the Hayao Miyazaki Collection box set, but after Aska (Shigeaki Miyazaki) of the duo was arrested for drug possession, Walt Disney Studios Japan removed it from the set, delayed the release by two weeks, and stopped shipments of the Ghibli ga Ippai Special Short Short DVD.

On October 27, 2014, Studio Ghibli's Toshio Suzuki announced that the company and Disney would send Blu-ray discs to buyers of the box set who could provide proof of purchase, with Studio Ghibli handling distribution directly. On April 10, 2019, Walt Disney Japan announced a Blu-ray and DVD release of an expanded edition titled Ghibli ga Ippai Special Short Short 1992-2016, which includes "On Your Mark"; it came out on July 17, 2019.