Pitchfork

Okay, so interactivity ain't all it's cracked up to be. Here I was, all excited to take my reviewing skills into THE THIRD DIMENSION. But rather than getting the musical equivalent of a novel, I was about to dig into a Choose Your Own Adventure, baby, controlling my destiny like a true red-blooded American.

If there's any musical entity fitting for this open-ended treatment, it's Gorillaz, an act that doesn't physically exist beyond binary code. Nominally some kind of oblique statement about the artificiality of today's pop stars, there were about a million ways this cartoon group could've been Jem 2000, quickly filed in the novelty-music dustbin of history. But saved by an actually pretty decent album of spooky, vaguely hip-hop-flavored solo material from Blur's Damon Albarn and a gaggle of other hipsters and bold-edged lewd anime from Tank Girl creator Jamie Hewlett, Gorillaz beat out many flesh groups to become the rare act with success on both sides of the Atlantic.

Chalk up a big chunk of that success to the video for "Clint Eastwood", a Leone-inspired (Sergio, not Dominique) video featuring, amongst other things, a gigantic static ghost voiced by Del tha Funkee Homosapien and zombie monkeys recreating the choreography from Thriller. Like a rebel yell, it made me want more, more, more, and so the idea of a Gorillaz video collection was quite delectable.

That's basically what Phase One: Celebrity Take Down is, as it collects "Clint Eastwood" and the band's four other videos, with a whole bunch of extra stuff (some interesting, some useless) thrown in for padding. All of this material is arranged into an environment very similar to the renowned Gorillaz website, with all the features spread out over the band members' rooms and other nooks and crannies of their house. This arrangement allows Hewlett to cram the DVD full of interesting clutter and detail, as well as some nifty 3-D CGI, but also makes it practically impossible to get to what you want to see quickly-- no labels anywhere, unless there's a booklet not included in my promo copy's slipcase that helps point the viewer towards his goal.

The fancy interface can't cover up a dearth of material, however; there's not much beyond the videos, and the ones that aren't "Clint Eastwood" are only marginally more interesting than screensavers, the bizarre Road Rally of "19-2000" excepted. For the 2% of the world that cares, they also include extensive kinematics and sketches for all the videos, so you can enjoy the animation in stationary, pencil form.

Visuals from the Gorillaz live show are also provided, using even more recycled footage than the videos, and there are two award show performances where one can use the angle button to view different computer animations created for the event. This feat of technology is easily overshadowed by the guest rappers filling for Del on the Chinese award show performance of "Clint Eastwood", two earnest fellas that nonetheless prove that the Mandarin incarnation of The Streets is gonna be a whole lot harder to swallow.

Further strewn about are a few thirty-second clips featuring the band members (Gorilla Bites), segments which prove that 1) the group possesses a very distinctively British wit (one clip revolves around how to kill an eel for culinary purposes), and 2) a lot more could have been done to add depth to these drawerings. The message I took away from the DVD is that, surprisingly, the conceptual part of Gorillaz lags far behind the music; despite all the detail, there's not much character to the characters (they're even outperformed by Hewlett and Albarn's Cuckoo's Nest impressions in the mockumentary Charts of Darkness).

The Gorillaz's feature film currently in the works might remedy this failing (and just might be the best movie featuring fictional musicians since Glitter), but in terms of this release, the wasted potential of the gimmick and relative weakness of the features makes it little more than a take-home version of the website for the DSL-impaired.