Exploring Dora

Hungry serpents, smoking fish, a gyrating chorus of translucent cylindrical entities – there is an intriguing wealth of oddness to this marvellously mystical film set in an undersea, outer space world of limited logic.

Crafted by the PRETTYBIRD director for the title track of Eels’ thirteenth studio album, Earth to Dora, it tells the tale of our forlorn eponymous hero, a young woman who finds herself stranded on the moon amid surreal images of sadness. 

It’s up to her friend E (stage name of the band’s founder Mark Oliver Everett) to convince her she is needed and it's time to come back down to Earth. 

Isabel Garrett says: "The song is about E trying to cheer up an old friend over text. There’s something magical and otherworldly about the lyrics that made me think of Dora being stuck on another planet, surrounded by misery and needing a route home. For me the song is about the distance that depression creates and the beauty of companionship. I liked the idea of mixing paint with stop motion to make a world which is a bit playful and nostalgic, with lots of handmade texture to capture the sensitivity of the lyrics."

Garrett used stop motion, mixed with paintings by two animators David Mcshane and Renee Zhan. Explaining the process, Garrett said: “David Mcshane animated most of the video – it took about three weeks to animate all the stop motion. It's the old-fashioned way of animating the puppets frame-by-frame, and the average is about 10 seconds of film per day. The paint is gouache on glass, which is also a traditional animation technique, but we shot it on green screen so it could be composited into the stop-motion world.”