A-ha Take On Me: how a pencil sketch changed pop music forever

How a pencil sketch changed pop music forever

Over the next few weeks, I decided to look at the brilliant world where pop music meets animation. This animation lark gets everywhere, and here is a classic to get us started on that journey.

Before the song became an image

When Take On Me first appeared in 1984, it was not the cultural phenomenon we now remember. A-ha released an early version of the song that barely registered outside Scandinavia. It had a strong melody, an impossibly high chorus, and plenty of 80s sheen, but at this point, nothing about it suggested permanence.

What changed everything was not the song, but the decision to reintroduce it through animation.

At a time when music videos were still finding their visual language, Take On Me didn’t simply illustrate a track. It built a parallel narrative, one that gave the song an emotional depth and connection, visual identity, and a kind of romantic urgency that audio alone couldn’t provide.

The decision to animate

The video was directed by Steve Barron, already known for understanding how music and image could work together rather than compete. Instead of using performance footage or flashy studio effects, Barron chose a hybrid approach: live action blended with hand-drawn animation, using a technique known as rotoscoping.

Rotoscoping involves tracing over live-action footage frame by frame to create animated movement that maintains its human realism. It’s a painstaking, slow, and deeply unglamorous process. For Take On Me, animator Michael Patterson and his team reportedly spent months drawing thousands of frames by hand; it paid off, big time.

The result was something that felt neither fully animated nor fully real, creating a world that hovered somewhere between imagination and reality. That ambiguity turned out to be the video’s greatest strength.

A story you could step into

The narrative is deceptively simple. A young woman is reading a comic in a café when the illustrated hero reaches out and pulls her into his world. What follows is a chase, an escape, a brief romance, and a final leap back into reality, all within a catchy pop tune.

What’s remarkable is how clearly the animation establishes emotional stakes without dialogue. The pencil-sketched world feels fragile, almost impermanent; the hero can be erased, torn, or destroyed at any moment. The woman’s decision to follow him is not just romantic; it’s risky.

Animation here is not decorative. It is the story. The drawn lines visibly shake, smudge, and fade. You are constantly aware that this world exists only as long as someone is willing to keep drawing it.

Why the pencil mattered

The choice to animate in a sketch-like style rather than polished colour was crucial. These weren’t cartoon characters in the traditional sense; instead, they were unfinished and, most importantly, human.

The rough pencil lines gave the video intimacy. It felt handmade in a medium that was rapidly becoming slick and commercial. All this was in a time when the world was becoming increasingly obsessed with gloss, and Take On Me looked vulnerable.

That vulnerability mirrored the song itself. Beneath the synths and the famous falsetto, Take On Me amplified the song’s emotion through the video.

MTV, repetition, and permanence

Once the video entered heavy rotation on MTV, everything changed. The song was re-released, and this time around it exploded. Take On Me topped charts worldwide and became inseparable from its visuals.

This is an important moment in animation history because it demonstrated something new: animation could define a pop song’s identity just as strongly as the music itself could.

The video wasn’t a novelty that viewers watched once. It rewarded repetition. Each viewing revealed more details from the flickering lines, the transitions between worlds, and the way the characters’ eyes remained expressive even when reduced to graphite. Viewers loved it, and the animation made the video endlessly rewatchable.

Cultural impact beyond the charts

Take On Me has never really left the cultural scene. The video is regularly cited among the most excellent music videos ever made, but more interestingly, it continues to be referenced, parodied, and reimagined even over 40 years later.

From Family Guy to The Simpsons, from adverts to tribute videos, its visual language is instantly recognisable. The pencil-sketch aesthetic has become shorthand for longing, nostalgia, and romantic escape.

Animation as emotional shorthand

What Take On Me proved, quietly but decisively, was that animation could communicate emotion faster than realism. A drawn world could feel more fragile than a filmed one. A sketched face could convey yearning more directly than a close-up.

This changed how directors approached music videos in the late 80s and 90s. Animation was no longer just for novelty or comedy. It could be romantic and melancholic too.

You can draw a straight line from Take On Me to later animated or hybrid videos from Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer to Gorillaz decades later, all of them understanding that animation allows artists to step sideways out of reality rather than trying to heighten it.

Financial success was built slowly.

From a commercial point of view, Take On Me is a textbook example of patience paying off. The song’s success was not instant. It took reinvention, investment, and belief in the visual concept.

Once it landed, however, it became one of the decade’s best-selling singles. The album Hunting High and Low sold millions worldwide, and A-ha became globally recognised almost overnight.

The video itself, while expensive for its time, has paid for itself countless times over in cultural capital alone. Few music videos have achieved such longevity without becoming dated.

Three things you might not know about Take On Me

First, the animation took approximately 16 weeks to complete; in pop video terms, this is an eternity, especially in the mid-1980s.

Second, the rotoscoping technique was chosen not because it was fashionable, but because it allowed animators to preserve the lead singer’s (Morten Harket) distinctive movements and expressions while still working within a drawn world.

Third, a-ha themselves were initially uncertain about the video. Its success reshaped not only the song’s reception, but their entire public image.

As a cheeky fourth, the video has had more than 2 billion views on YouTube. Go on, make it two billion and one. Take On Me - A-ha

Does it still matter?

Over forty years on, Take On Me remains a reminder of what happens when animation is trusted with emotion. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t wink at the audience. It simply invites you into a fragile space and asks you to care.

In a media landscape now saturated with digital perfection, the video’s visible pencil lines feel almost radical. You can see the labour of love and the human hand behind it all.

And perhaps that’s why it endures. Take On Me doesn’t promise escape without cost. It shows us that stepping into another world means accepting its fragility, and choosing, again and again, to believe in it anyway and for a four-minute pop video, that’s quite an achievement.