There is a moment in a-ha’s “Take On Me” when the girl looks up from her coffee and realizes the comic-book hero is looking back. It is a wonderfully 1985 idea: romance as a portal, pencil lines as a doorway, and a chorus that sounds like somebody asking for one brave chance.
Then the video does something more interesting. It refuses to let the two worlds stay separate.
If you have somehow missed it, the video moves between live action and a black-and-white comic drawn in loose pencil. The technique is rotoscoping: filming movement, then drawing over the frames. The BBC’s account of the video’s making says animator Michael Patterson spent 16 weeks sketching roughly 3,000 drawings. That is not a weekend project. That is a small mountain of patient marks.
The official credits at Patterson and Reckinger’s site name Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger as the animation directors. Their work gives the video its strange double vision: the comic feels more alive than the café, while the café feels safer than the comic. One world is exciting but dangerous. The other is ordinary but solid.
That tension is the whole song’s emotional engine. “Take On Me” is not just asking, “Do you like me?” It is asking, “Will you come with me, even though the place I’m inviting you into is unfinished?” The comic hero is literally sketched in. He has no polished edges. He is a possibility with a motorcycle.
And then comes the escape. The girl returns to the ordinary world, but the ordinary world has been altered. The strange thing has followed her home. Or perhaps she has learned to see the room differently. That is what longing often does. It does not simply make us dissatisfied with the present. It gives the present a second outline.
My favorite part is that the video does not treat reinvention as a clean makeover. There is no triumphant “new you” montage with suspiciously good lighting. The transition is messy. It involves fear, a torn page, and a person who has to decide whether the familiar world is still enough.
The song’s public life followed a similar path. Official Charts records a 19-week UK chart run, while the video became a defining example of how an ambitious visual could change a pop song’s reach. The band did not merely release a track; they built a doorway around it.
So what happened? A Norwegian band made a pop song and paired it with an unusually labor-intensive animated film. What did it mean? Millions of listeners were invited to believe that longing could be both frightening and creative. What can we carry forward? Maybe this: reinvention rarely begins with a finished plan. It begins with a line, then another, then the willingness to step through the panel before you know how the story ends.
What is one unfinished possibility you keep treating as if it needs to be polished before you can enter it?
