Synopsis

Michael Jackson is transformed into the centerpiece of a bizarre amusement park built from tabloid headlines, celebrity gossip, and rumors about his private life. He moves through a surreal collage of newspapers, toys, statues, circus imagery, and animated objects, while the media's exaggerated portrait of him becomes increasingly absurd. Jackson ultimately turns the spectacle against its creators, rejecting the public's fascination with his eccentric image and delivering the song's blunt message: stop watching, judging, and intruding.

Factoids & Trivia

• The video was created as a highly elaborate mixture of live action, collage, optical effects, and stop-motion animation. Jackson's filmed movements were converted into still images, cut out, layered, and animated frame by frame.

• Although the live-action material was shot in only a few days, the effects work took approximately nine months to complete.

• The imagery parodies several stories and tabloid rumors surrounding Jackson in the 1980s, including reports about his appearance, his pet chimpanzee Bubbles, and the claim that he wanted to acquire the bones of Joseph Merrick, the "Elephant Man."

• The sequence featuring Jackson dancing with the Elephant Man's bones turns a particularly invasive rumor into deliberately playful visual comedy.

• "Leave Me Alone" was originally a bonus track included on the compact disc edition of Bad rather than on the album's first vinyl pressings. The video helped give the track a much larger profile.

• The short film was included in Jackson's 1988 film Moonwalker, where it appears as one of the movie's surreal music-video segments.

• It won the 1989 Cannes Gold Lion for Best Special Effects and the 1990 Grammy Award for Best Music Video, Short Form.

• The video is notable for allowing Jackson to satirize the sensational image built around him instead of responding to each rumor individually. Its humor is therefore both a parody of tabloid culture and a public demand for privacy.