Artist Lauren Tsai, creator of the stop-motion series The Dying World, has collaborated with New Jersey band My Chemical Romance. Drawing on The Dying World and its characters, she created a short film based on “The End,” the first song on My Chemical Romance’s 2006 album The Black Parade.
After their breakup in 2013, My Chemical Romance reunited in 2019. Their most recent world tour celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the release of The Black Parade, a notable album in their discography. Reports suggest singer Gerard Way has been teasing MCR5, which fans dubbed the long-awaited fifth album over a decade ago. Whether there is a connection to MCR5 is unknown, but My Chemical Romance and artist Lauren Tsai have worked together on a short film featuring their music and her stop-motion universe, The Dying World.
My Chemical Romance and Lauren Tsai team up for short stop-motion film
In the stop-motion film, we see the Dean of the Paper Academy reprimanding Astrid for repeatedly drawing “that thing,” hoping that she doesn’t believe it’s real. Astrid says that she feels she has forgotten something, but the Dean reprimands her for falling behind the other students. After leaving the office, the Dean tells his assistant to throw out the trash. The hallways of the school are littered with garbage bags, which are consistently discarded. Astrid listens to voicemails from various concerned friends and family before lying down on the floor of her room as The End by My Chemical Romance begins to play. Then, the dean’s assistant comes in, grabs her sketchpad, and throws it into the garbage chute. Astrid dives inside and finds herself in The Dying World.
According to Tsai’s interview with Indiewire, The Dying World, first introduced in Part One: Forgetting, represents a “trash dump for discarded thoughts”. In The Black Parade, the Patient, a recurring character that appears throughout the album’s songs, is also taken to a strange realm of past memories to see the marching band as his life fades out. There are definitely connections between Astrid’s and the Patient’s realities, and it will be interesting to see if this leads to another chapter in My Chemical Romance’s lore.
“I was interested in someone who might have slipped into being forgotten themselves while they were still alive, so that’s Astrid. And Astrid is able to go between these two realms, although, in my mind, the Dying World and the real world are all one place.” – Lauren Tsai
Kojima, Billie Eilish, and Phoebe Bridgers have cameos in the My Chemical Romance short film
The two main characters in the short film are Astrid, who is voiced by creator Lauren Tsai herself, and the dean, voiced by John C. McGinley (Scrubs, Platoon). In the voicemails, you hear Billie Eilish as Astrid’s friend and Phoebe Bridgers as her sister. Video game fans might recognize Hideo Kojima as Astrid’s teacher. He leaves Astrid a voicemail, telling her that her Japanese homework is late again, and it’s unacceptable.
Kojima is a self-proclaimed My Chemical Romance fan. He even revealed that he saw the band live in 2006, during the Black Parade era, and was complimented for the merch he was wearing. We’ve seen Kojima in all sorts of video games, whether his own or not. As a My Chemical Romance fan, I’m sure he was psyched to get a cameo on this short.
Tsai and Kojima worked together in the past. She played a small role in Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, where she asked players to find her some drawing materials for her illustrations. Now, Kojima’s the one being featured in her work.
Leave a Reply