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“But if the last one wasn't there, it would all be wrong.”
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Carousel was a proposed anthology film by Gorillaz creators Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett consisting of 15 loosely connected animated and live-action shorts paired to music, with each short representing a different stage of life from birth until death, all taking place on a 100-mile long Victorian pier. It was to be accompanied by a soundtrack that would be performed in concert by a live band. It was described by Gorillaz co creator Damon Albarn as being "an inbetween of Gorillaz and The Good, the Bad & The Queen.". Recording sessions for Carousel took place from June 2008 to November 2009 before it was eventually scrapped and became Gorillaz' third album "Plastic Beach" in 2010.
Background[]
The only known short for the Carousel project: “The Halloweeners”.
In 2008, after Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett worked on the opera Monkey: Journey to the West, they began to crafting a new Gorillaz project called Carousel. The idea for Carousel was originally suggested by The Clash's Paul Simonon (who would eventually become the bassist for Plastic Beach's live band) while working with Albarn on The Good, the Bad & the Queen. In Hewlett's words, Carousel would have been "something like a movie, but not with a single narrative, but with many short stories built around a larger one, set in music, animation, live action, and many different styles.". On his part, Damon began to compose the music, thus creating a total of 70 songs for the project. The 15 stories for Carousel were going to be about the mystical aspects of Britain and represent a different period of human life, with all of the stories set on the same 100-mile pier. The pier eventually became a part of the Plastic Beach model, and can be seen in depth on the Plastic Beach ident Night Pier (Terry's Pier) and some parts of the Plastic Beach web game. A short representing childhood and innocence, "The Halloweeners", was about trick or treaters who see something worse and worse in each house they knock on until they eventually become the monsters that they're dressed up as. Another short representing death was the origin of Plastic Beach's main antagonist The Boogieman, as evidenced by a piece featuring The Boogieman called 'New Amusements' that is shown in Jamie Hewlett's 2017 art book and featured outside of the Gorillaz section of the book. The movie was to end in a segment centered on (in Damon's words) "a carousel with creatures on it" that would be "a flashback of your entire life", presumably summing up the different parts of movie.
In the end, the project turned out to be too ambitious, with Damon and Jamie struggling with Carousel’s structure and EMI refusing to fund the project, causing Carousel to be scrapped altogether and being reworked into the band’s third album, Plastic Beach (similar to how elements of Celebrity Harvest were eventually reworked into Demon Days).
Known Tracks[]
Outside of the tracks that can be found on "Plastic Beach", only a few select tracks were thought to be a part of the Carousel recording sessions. One such track is entitled "Electric Shock", which debuted in demo form on BBC Radio during a Damon Albarn DJ session in January 2009, a little over a year from Plastic Beach's release in March 2010. The other demo tracks that debuted at the radio show (and can now be found on "Plastic Beach") were "Stylo" and "Broken".
Trivia[]
- The idea of connecting short stories into a larger one did came into fruition with the visuals for Plastic Beach.
- Although the movie was to be produced by Damon and Jamie, the Gorillaz band members themselves may not have been planned to appear in the movie outside of a cameo appearance or a single short.
- This is Damon and Jamie's second attempt at making a movie together since Celebrity Harvest, and the way the movie was scrapped in favour of Plastic Beach is similar to how Celebrity Harvest eventually became Demon Days.