An animated version of President Trump transforms into a robotic, missile-firing swastika in new music video by electronic artist Moby.
The depiction appears about halfway through the music video for the song “In This Cold Place” released Monday in support of the Grammy-nominated musician’s newest album, “More Fast Songs About the Apocalypse.”
A school-age boy clad in a superhero’s cape is shown attentively watching satirical versions of children’s cartoons as the video begins, including parodies of “The Care Bears” and “The Transformers.”
The cartoons grow increasingly grim as the character ages during the duration of the video, and before long he’s depicted as an adult watching a particularly bleak episode featuring a character resembling a combination of Mr. Trump and a “Transformer” villain.
At one point the character transforms itself from an exaggerated version of the president into a robotic swastika, then morphs again into a missile-firing money sign that wreaks havoc on a dystopian cartoon city before ultimately being destroyed during a popular uprising.
“As time has passed, I’ve wanted more and more for my work to somehow reflect my political concerns and my world views and issues that are important to me,” Moby, 51, told The Huffington Post Monday. “I’ve realized that music videos are just a really good way of trying to do that.”
Steve Cutts, the video’s director, said the Saturday morning cartoon format “seemed an apt way of depicting the circus of modern society, with the film focusing on our consumerism, greed, corruption and ultimately our self destructiveness.”
According to The Huffington Post, Moby designed the concept behind the video but urged its director “to make it even more dystopian and more extreme.”
“’Oh, do you think we can get away with this?’” Moby recalled Mr. Cutts asking. “And I was like, ’yeah, why not, just make it, go as far you want.’”
Other entertainers have had mixed success lately in using their art to take aim at Mr. Trump. Comedian Kathy Griffin ignited a firestorm last month for posing in a grisly photo shoot featuring a model of the president’s decapitated head. More recently, protesters were arrested over the weekend for interrupting a controversial version of William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” in New York City in which a character resembling Mr. Trump is assassinated.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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