How do you make a video for a band that (at that point) doesn’t perform live and doesn’t want to appear on camera? For the song Don’t Answer Me by The Alan Parsons Project, the answer was to create it all with animation, and to throw every style in the book at the project.

This music video took 23 days to film, using 40 animators at the Broadcast Arts studio. (Broadcast Arts later worked on the first season of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, another place to find multiple animation styles under one roof.) Framed as a comic book set in 1930s Florida, The Adventures of Nick and Sugar primarily uses the unusual combination of hand-drawn cells mounted on figures that move through stop-motion animation. There’s even a touch of clay animation thrown in with the moon. The band appears only in drawnings near the end.

Despite what its Wikipedia entry says, this video was not a finalist for MTV Music Video of the Year. It was entered for Most Experimental Video, along with You Might Think, but the winner for that category was Rockit.

We’ll close with a behind-the-scenes look at the making of this video. Enjoy!