The November 28th broadcast of Adult Swim's Toonami action/anime block premiered a music video for the experimental rock group Battles' song "Sugar Foot." If the strange animation style of the video seems familiar, you're likely recognizing the style of the animation collective AC-bu, which was responsible for the Pop Team Epic segments "Hellshake Yano" and "Bob Epic Team." This music video can be enjoyed as simply a bit of surrealist eye and ear candy, but it's also unmistakably an artistic reaction to the coronavirus pandemic.
The official video description on Youtube reads: "In 2020, the outbreak of Covid-19 caused a global lockdown and restricted many activities and events in the world. This music video depicts the ’Great Space Robot Festival’ that unfolds to avenge canceled [sic] festivals and events, in the hope that humanity will be able to overcome the crisis and move towards a better world."
This description offers a clearer narrative context to the wild space festivities presented than the video itself provides, but even without knowing the "plot," the symbolic meaning of the imagery is unmistakable, particularly in the second half of the video. "Meteorites" start hurtling towards the festival, and a bigger piloted mech defends smaller Transformers-style anthropomorphic robots from the impact. The meteorites' design looks nothing like actual meteorites and a lot like images of the coronavirus.
More pandemic imagery appears throughout the video alongside all the wacky retro sci-fi action. Some of the imagery is direct, such as a video of someone in a mask asking the robot fighters to "do your best." Other connections are less direct; the main pilot boy, for instance, seems to experience the festival mainly through TV screens while isolated within his robot, which could be a nod to the many virtual festivals that have made the struggles of social distancing more bearable.
In the end, the video comes together to deliver a hopeful message in the most over-the-top mecha anime way imaginable. The Earth itself opens up to release a robot to fight the "meteorites" with a musical performance. When that robot is overwhelmed, the Earth becomes a very kawaii robot that destroys the "meteorites" once and for all by shooting the moon at it. The path to recovery from this pandemic will likely involve a lot more distancing, masks and vaccines that it will giant robots, but defeating COVID will require just as much global teamwork as this literal global battle.