Above, young Edgar (played by Al Yankovic wearing a rubber appliance) looks on in rapt fascination as the mysteries of the pancreas are revealed in Weird Al Yankovic's music video "Pancreas" directed by Jim Blashfield. In this scene the organ  is joined in an interpretive dance  by  diagrams of a  spleen and  bladder which have recently escaped from a medical chart.
LESS ANCIENT LORE
AL'S  PANCREAS
  ANCIENT LORE When producer Melissa Marsland sent a copy of Jim Blashfield's short film SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES to Talking Heads in 1985, the band commissioned the team to create a video for their upcoming single And She Was from the album, Little Creatures.
    There followed a succession of ground breaking music videos that imaginatively expanded the definition of the genre and captured attention around the world. The videos received numerous MTV nominations and awards as well as a Cannes Golden Lion and a Grammy. Rolling Stone listed two of the videos (And She Was and Michael Jackson's Leave Me Alone) among the 100 best videos of all time.
"...Time to eat all your words, swallow your pride, open your eyes..."

Tears for Fears

SOWING THE
SEEDS OF LOVE
The Seeds of Love



"...Everything is bound to rise and fall, that's all..."

Marc Cohn

WALK THROUGH THE WORLD
The Rainy Season
"... And she was looking at herself and things were looking like a movie..."

Talking Heads

AND SHE WAS
Little Creatures
"...Sittin' around in someall-night zoo, watching it run like a
movie..."

Joni Mitchell

GOOD FRIENDS
Dog Eat Dog




"...Hey darlin', tell me what it's all about..."

NuShooz

I CAN'T WAIT
Poolside
.
"It was a slow day and the sun was beating
on the soldiers by the side of the road..."

Paul Simon

BOY IN THE
BUBBLE
Graceland
...Leave me alone..stop
it! Just stop doggin' me
around..."

Michael Jackson

LEAVE ME ALONE
Bad
    It is the first time Blashfield has used music video to explore a performer's persona.  His other clips have struck exclusively to the song's content.  His first, for Talking Heads' And She Was reflected the song's giddy sense of dissociation by presenting a woman floating above her neighborhood, looking down with glee on the mementos and landmarks of her life. Blashfield created Paul Simon's Boy in the Bubble, which presents images of ancient ritual and modern science as equally magical, and Joni Mitchell's Good Friends, where the animator replays an old relationship through its now shadowy icons.
"...For every job so many men, so many
men no one needs..."

Peter Gabriel

DON'T GIVE UP
So
The Classic Music Videos
D i r e c t e d  b y  J I M  B L A S H F I E L D
Animated diagrams, reminiscent of 1950s health and science films, demonstrate how the organ works. But since it is  a Blashfield video, allegedly "normal" things are of course not normal at all. The video is populated by numerous sets of symmetrical twins, for example--men in suits-- some singing, some shaking things and some separated from their hands and arms, which carry on various disembodied musical solos with sticks, old car seats, and tubes squirting mystery liquids.
In this archival review, the writer  Jim Farber reflects on the  Blashfield Studio's music videos and production
techniques of the 
mid-1980s.

GHOSTS OF POP

Reprinted from
Connoisseur Magazine
May 1989
The result is what might be called a "surrealist musical medical instruction film"-- or possibly what a Brian Wilson music video made in the 1930s might  have looked like had the production been hijacked by a group of Dada-ists-- alternately hilarious and a little strange,
As director of some
of music video's most adventurously animated clips, Blashfield takes real objects from everyday life-- newspapers, baby carriages, spatulas-- and then photographs, Xeroxes, and animates them until they become hauntingly metaphorical. This unique animation process gives Blashfield's images a look at once antique and abstract, as if all of them were alluding to past, subconscious events.

In Blashfield's..."Leave Me Alone" section of Michael Jackson's full length Moonwalker home video, the director presents Jackson's life as an amusement park ride, both cartoonish and menacing.  While poking fun at the wildest tabloid rumors about the star's life, Blashfield offers unexpected insight into Jackson's psychology.  He constructs two Jacksons here-- one an impish child, the other a Gulliver-style giant, trapped in a labyrinth of roller coasters and log flumes.  With wit and empathy, he portrays him as an adult enslaved to a child's fantasies.
In all these works, the animation is dense and dark, giving the impression of an old scrapbook.  Key motifs recur-- newspapers and TV sets (to represent the collective media unconscious) and the sending of everyday objects into orbit (creating a separate universe).  In this rearrangement of reality Blashfield tries to get at the hidden connection between objects and ideas.  "I feel objects and environments can function as metaphors for ideas we've been constructing in our heads that we can't put our finger on,"he says.  The director's tone can be just as hard to pin down.  There is something a little sinister in animating such ordinary objects, but there is also a non sequitur humor.  Blashfield himself cannot decide what some motifs represent: his fiery halos around some objects, for instance, mean "one of two things," he smiles. "Either the object is holy or it is radioactive".        

 --Jim Farber.
The video is one of six  included in"Weird Al" Yankovic's  DualDisc "Straight Outta Lynnwood" and is an homage to pop music legend Brian Wilson of Beach Boys fame. The video combines Wilson-esque arrangements and vocals with vintage live-action  depictions of 1930s radio broadcasts and  realistic looking animation of an undulating pancreas
In the animated world of Jim Blashfield everything familiar looks strange.
ANCIENT STATUARY

Music Video Awards and Nominations

1986 / And She Was
MTV NOMINATIONS Best Group Video / Best Concept Video

1987 / Boy in the Bubble
MTV NOMINATIONS Best Video / Best Special Effects / Best Art Direction / Most Experimental / Viewers' Choice

1989 / Leave Me Alone
GRAMMY Best Music Video, Short Form
CANNES GOLDEN LION Best Special Effects
MTV AWARD Best Special Effects
MTV NOMINATIONS Best Video / Breakthrough Video /Best Special Effects / Best Art Direction / Best Editing / Viewers' Choice

1990 / Sowing the Seeds of Love
MTV AWARDS Breakthrough Video / Best Special Effects
MTV NOMINATIONS  Best Concept Video / Best Post Modern Video / Breakthrough Video / Best Special Effects
Producer for Blashfield Studio was Marilyn Zornado.