Synopsis

A young woman flips through a comic book in a cafe and is suddenly drawn into its world. There, she meets a motorcycle-racing hero played by Morten Harket and is swept into a high-speed escape from two menacing racers. The pair move between pencil-sketch animation and live action as the comic's boundaries begin to collapse. Back in the real world, she struggles to escape the storybook, while the hero fights to follow her out.

Factoids & Trivia

• The familiar video was made after earlier versions of "Take On Me" failed to gain traction. Warner executive Jeff Ayeroff backed a more ambitious concept for the song's US release.

• Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger created the hand-drawn sequences with rotoscoping, tracing over live-action footage frame by frame. The process took roughly 16 weeks and involved about 3,000 individual frames.

• The visual approach grew partly out of Patterson's earlier animated short "Commuter," which explored a similar pencil-sketch technique.

• The live-action cafe scenes were filmed at Kim's Cafe in London, while the racing material and animated sequences were constructed to make the comic-book world feel like a continuation of the same physical space.

• The video helped turn a-ha from a little-known Norwegian trio into an international pop act. "Take On Me" eventually reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1985.

• At the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards, the video won six awards, including Best New Artist in a Video, Best Concept Video, Most Experimental Video, Best Special Effects, Best Direction, and Viewer's Choice.

• The story continued visually in a-ha's videos for "The Sun Always Shines on T.V." and "Train of Thought," creating a loose trilogy around the comic-book imagery.

• A 4K restoration was prepared from the original 35mm film. It includes the original end credits and preserves small frame-level differences that had not appeared in some earlier versions.