Gorillaz Take Us Through the Peaks and Pits of ‘The Mountain’ in New Animated Short Film

In a documentary made while on the road recording their freshly released album The Mountain, Gorillaz co-founders Jamie Hewlett and Damon Albarn find themselves in the thick of India. Kaleidoscopic crowds in Delhi, faded palace walls in Jaipur, gushing greenery in Rishikesh, and the smoke-shrouded Ganga river in Varanasi, along with time spent in the studio deciphering the language of Indian classical music with flautist Ajay Prasanna, become the backdrop against which Hewlett and Albarn peel away the layers that led them up The Mountain. 

Those trips to India, taken in the wake of profound personal grief, slowly took shape as slivers of a storyboard. The final manifestation is an eight-minute hand-drawn animated short directed by Hewlett along with London-based animation Studio THE LINE. Sewing together “The Mountain,” “The Moon Cave” and “The Sad God” into an interconnected narrative arc, this is, as Hewlett previously told Rolling Stone India, “a condensed explanation about what is being sung about on this record, which is essentially the story of life.”

The short film flips open with a frame of the mountain, standing tall with all its peaks and pits. The virtual band’s guitarist Noodle (who has seemingly reverted to a younger version of herself) then jumps into a canopy of trees in a sun-dappled forest inspired by Disney’s The Jungle Book. As the shimmering strains of Anoushka Shankar’s sitar, Ajay Prasanna’s flute and Amaan and Ayaan Ali Bangash’s sarod plays on, Noodle — clad in a red cape and sporting an unruly shag of hair in a clear nod to Mowgli —swings, stumbles and swims her way through the jungle (even accidentially awakening a giant fossilised dragon along the way) before she is reunited with her fellow band members, 2D, Murdoc and Russel Hobbs. 

It’s a bittersweet reunion, perhaps mirroring how Hewlett and Albarn found their own way back to each other through the course of this album. It’s also the moment when a set of theatrically large set of curtains emblazoned with the word Parvat (Mountain) in a devnagiri script slowly part ways, showing them the long and winding road up the mountain. Then, the disco beat drops, the energy shifts, and “The Moon Cave” bursts into motion. 

In classic Gorillaz fashion, there are enough moments of absurd humor to keep even the track’s heavier themes of loss feeling subversive: Murdoc peeing in a forest stream, Noodle casually floating by on Russel Hobbs’ stomach, a beady-eyed Plastic Guru peddling snake oil, and a baboon staring as the Gorillaz march by. 

In fact, this very scene of the Gorillaz’s adventures in an Indian jungle became the genesis of the Rolling Stone India cover (Even the Kaa-inspired snake, comfortably coiled around Murdoc on our cover, slithers in a few moments later, its eyes popping with swirling hearts as Murdoc blows a goodbye kiss). 

After prancing and panting their way through the rugged terrain, the Gorillaz find themselves entranced by a moon rising above the crown of a Shiva statue in the distance, revealing “The Moon Cave” in all its shimmering, Blue Grotto-esque glory. Featuring the posthumous voices of Bobby Womack and Dave Joliceur, the visuals in “The Moon Cave” are perhaps a play on memories etched for eternity, represented through cave hieroglyphics that come alive like acid trip hallucinations. There’s even a surreal squawking bird mimicking the words of disco legend Asha Puthli, while the floating heads of rapper Black Thought and R&B/soul musician Jalen Ngonda drift through the cave as they deliver their loaded verses. 

As they near the end of the cave, the mood switches up once again when a shadowy figure dressed in all-white shows up in a canoe to transition into “The Sad God.” There’s a melancholic gut punch that underscores the final moments of the film, as the characters drift through foggy mists and rows of statues before plunging into the deep end. One by one, 2-D, Noodle, and Russel Hobbs dive headfirst into the water, echoing the sacred soul-purifying dips Hewlett and Albarn experienced in Varanasi. Murdoc is the last to go, but when prompted by an unsettling smile that creeps up across the unknown figure’s skeletal face, he finds himself swirling down the abyss — an act that likely signifies how he must come face-to-face with death itself in order to be reborn.

Littered with references to the album’s core themes of dread, death, life, and rebirth, the short film, in keeping with Gorillaz’ abstract and often anarchic visual language, becomes a rite of passage that transcends the synthetic, trash‑strewn surrealism of Plastic Beach and the stark, apocalyptic imagery of Demon Days, to confront the deeper existential questions that define our very being.

The painstakingly hand-drawn animations manage to hauntingly evoke the paradoxical pull of chaos and calm that most visitors take away from India, a feeling that — as Hewlett points out in the accompanying documentary — came from wanting to “melt” into the country’s often overwhelming but intoxicating complexities. Gorillaz’ first short film crystallises the existential adventure that is The Mountain, making it feel like a magnificent climb through life’s peaks and pits.