Björk
Michel Gondry showed up to this shoot assuming he'd be filming Icelandic landscapes. Björk told him no. She wanted handmade textures, a stuffed bear, and an animation feel. He went and built one of the most influential videos of the decade. "Human Behaviour" was Björk's first solo single and the first of six collaborations with Gondry. The song's vocal melody was written by Björk as a child — when she was in The Sugarcubes, nobody could figure out the right music for it. Producer Nellee Hooper finally did, building the percussion around a sample from Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Go Down Dying." The video's logic follows the song's: humans as objects of study, seen from an animal's perspective. Björk is chased through a forest by a giant stuffed bear — a toy, because she refused to put a live animal on set. The hunter dies. The animals win. Björk ends up resting inside the bear's stomach. Reference points: Yuri Norstein's 1975 Russian animation "Hedgehog in the Fog" and the darker Charles Perrault fairy tales — not the Disney versions. Six VMA nominations. Zero wins. Rolling Stone's Top 100 Music Videos of All Time. This was Gondry's first international project. Everything that came after — the visual texture, the handmade imperfection — starts here. The 1994 VMAs gave Aerosmith and R.E.M. everything. Björk wrote the vocal melody as a child; The Sugarcubes never found music to fit it — it sat unused for years until Nellee Hooper solved it Gondry had been working exclusively with the French band Oui Oui before this video brought him to international attention The six Björk-Gondry collaborations span twenty years: Human Behaviour, Hyperballad, Jóga, Bachelorette, Declare Independence, Crystalline Gondry's "Hedgehog in the Fog" reference comes from the 1975 Yuri Norstein animation — widely considered one of the greatest animated films ever made