Best Animated Music Videos of the 2010s

Drawn to the Beat: How the 2010s Revolutionized Animated Music Videos

The 2010s will be remembered as a seismic era for music videos. As traditional television airplay faded into the background and YouTube reigned supreme, artists found themselves freed from the commercial constraints of conventional live-action budgets.

Enter the animated music video. No longer reserved for novelty hits or indie passion projects, animation became a premier medium for artistic reinvention. During this decade, illustrators, digital studios, and auteur directors turned two-dimensional canvases into windows for surrealism, profound emotional storytelling, and viral phenomenon.

A Renaissance of Style and Mediums

What made the 2010s unique was the sheer variety of animation styles that flooded mainstream music. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, musicians partnered with global animation powerhouses to match their auditory aesthetics with distinct visual identities.

• Anime-Inspired Euphoria: The cross-pollination between electronic music and Japanese animation reached a fever pitch. Porter Robinson and Madeon’s collaborative masterpiece “Shelter” (2016)—produced in partnership with A-1 Pictures—delivered a heartbreaking, narrative-driven sci-fi short film about a young girl living inside a simulation. It proved that a four-minute pop-electronic track could carry the emotional weight of a feature-length anime film.
• Psychadelic and Indie Artistry: Indie artists embraced hand-drawn and delightfully weird aesthetics. Childish Gambino’s “Feels Like Summer” (2018) utilized a relaxed, walking-tour style of animation to populate a fictional neighborhood with a who’s-who of contemporary hip-hop and R&B figures, offering a bittersweet commentary on modern culture and climate change.
• Dark Fantasy and Stop-Motion: Radiohead’s haunting “Burn the Witch” (2016) utilized unsettling, classic stop-motion and Rankin/Bass-style claymation to subvert expectations, contrasting a cheerful children’s television aesthetic with a chilling narrative about mob mentality and mass hysteria.

Blurring the Lines Between Reality and Imagination

Animation allowed artists to bypass the laws of physics and explore concepts that would be impossible—or prohibitively expensive—to capture in live-action.

Take, for instance, the poignant animated video for Imagine Dragons’ “Birds” (2019). It tells a touching, cinematic story of two migratory creatures transitioning through life, love, and eventual separation, elevating a stadium-ready pop-rock track into a deep reflection on mortality and memory.

Similarly, viral hits like DyE’s “Fantasy” (2011) utilized sleek, French-house-infused electro-pop backdropped by surreal, body-horror animation that shocked and captivated the internet, proving that animation could easily out-daringly rival live-action thrillers.

The Legacy of the 2010s Digital Canvas

The 2010s proved that an animated music video is not merely a fallback option when an artist cannot show up to a set; it is a primary vehicle for world-building. By disconnecting the song from the artist’s physical face, animation allowed listeners to project their own inner narratives onto the music.