21st Century Trawling

by Greg Levrault

More Than Toast is love. They express it in their Anime Music Videos(AMVs), choice clips of Japanese cartoons remixed to a catchy tune. And their love is spreading.

Before they were More Than Toast, they were working at a Target store in West Palm Beach. One day, Kwazek received a CD featuring a clip of Pokemon singing along with the Mindless Self-Indulgence chestnut, "Bitches." Inspired by the possibilities, he created his AMV for Ben Folds Five's "Underground." He showed his video to Akimbo, who finished his first video the same afternoon he won an award for it. Their videos inspired Grungetta to give it a shot. By the time Akimbo's sister Zabet produced her first, they were the award winning combo More Than Toast, part of the current wave of creators advancing the AMV artform.

Understand, it's easy to create an AMV: outfit a computer with some editing software and a capture card or DVD burner. With some patience, two VCRs and a steady pause button will be sufficient. For that matter, what's the difference if you turn down the volume on your favorite episode of Transformers or Power Rangers, and crank up the radio? Find your favorite giant robot fight scene, keep it to the beat, and you can craft a video as good as anything they'd show on MTV. But it's still other people's music on top of other people's cartoons. Where's the art in that?

The best AMVs are their own movies, whether you're a fanatic to the music, the cartoon, or totally new to both. The composer becomes so familiar with the source material - the anime - that the composer develops a shorthand, a new alphabet consisting of the images and scenes that hint at the themes and subplots within. From there, the musical element provides a tempo and lyrical refrain that the artist spells out visually. The result creates new stories in familiar tones, universal messages in novel forms.

The MTT crew has this skill, this ability to find the kindred souls between songs and anime, in spades. Kwazek's first video uses footage from the cartoon "Lain," a cyberpunk tale about a girl treading the thin line between worlds real and virtual. His AMV turns a ironic song about the seriously trendy into a cautionary tale: beware of the ravenous appetites of cults of personality. Akimbo's video for "Girls" shed a spotlight on the female characters of "Dragonball Z." At the same time, it took the desperation in a punk anthem about the battles between the sexes, and turned the feeling into resignation. Zabet chose Paul McCartney's "Little Willow" to speak for the two Hiroshima orphans in "Grave of the Fireflies" But the most musically adventurous would have to be Grungetta, for her seamlessly weaving the neo-Charlie's Angels "Gunsmith Cats" with Bing Crosby! Now, that's chutzpah.

The process can be long and unpredictable. One of Kwazek's favorite anime is Cowboy Bebop, but as he remembered, "I never thought I'd be able to make a video for it" until he was winding down a marathon viewing of the series. "At the end of the last episode, I heard a character say, 'Boy, you better carry that weight...'" He rifled through his Beatles collection and played several albums against the show until he found "Yesterday" to provide his lyrical theme. "After the lyrical connection, then it takes listening to the song non-stop for months."

Akimbo has a more succinct method of creation: "Once the footage and music is on the computer, I generally do a few shots of vodka, close my eyes, and start randomly clicking on the screen.

MTT made a splash from their debut. The first MTT films (the ones inspired by their friend's CD) took top honors at JACON 2000, one of the nation's most prestigious showcase for the burgeoning AMV scene. Since then, they've created over 30 fan videos that have encouraged the maturation and scope of the genre. They've collected accolades in competitions nationwide. Their web site, where all the videos are available for download, has up to 30,000 visits and downloads monthly. And on services like Kazaa and Morpheus, unsuspecting fans looking for new Weezer and MXPX tracks discover the best videos they've never seen.

The MTT quarter has more than anime on their minds: Kwazek and Grungetta attend the University of Central Florida, in Orlando (she's studying anthropology, he's studying animation); Akimbo graduated in 2000, specializing in Management Information Systems; Zabet is enrolled at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

But this 21st century outsider art continues to jazz their imaginations. June is the next JACON, and its certain to bring more award-winning projects from the team. There's compilation projects such as DDDR, where AMV creaters pool together projects by theme. And as anime continues to swarm American airwaves and DVD shelves, inspiration continues to fly from all quarters. Whatever comes, More Than Toast will continue to compile new dreams from their computer screens...