Pharrell Goes Manga

Pharrell Williams has been quietly outing himself as a Japan obsessive for a while, and the video for It Girl is the point where quiet became unmistakable. The clip features Pharrell making prolonged, soulful eye contact with a manga girl—enormous dark eyes, melancholy affect, exactly the kind of face you’d find on the cover of a mid-2000s shōjo anthology—before the two of them sail through space with her crew in tow. It is exactly as strange as it sounds. It is also completely sincere, which is the more interesting thing about it.

This wasn’t entirely without precedent. Earlier that year Pharrell appeared as an animated version of his own hat—the famous one—in a Miku Hatsune video for Last Night, Good Night (Re:Dialed), which is either the most absurd career cameo in contemporary pop music or the most logical one depending on how much time you’ve spent on the internet. The man had already crossed over. It Girl was just a deeper commitment to a direction he’d already chosen.

For people like me—who have been quietly, sometimes embarrassingly, devoted to Attack on Titan and Terror in Resonance over most of what the Western prestige machine was producing at the time—there’s something genuinely satisfying about watching an artist at Pharrell’s level lean into it without hedging. Not as pastiche, not as knowing reference, but as an actual aesthetic position. Japanese animation and pop culture have been doing things visually and emotionally that the West either abandoned or never attempted. Pharrell seems to understand this, and he’s willing to put it on a mainstream video without an asterisk.

Whether It Girl is a great song is almost beside the point. As a statement of affiliation—a pop star effectively placing himself in a tradition that most of his Western contemporaries wouldn’t acknowledge in public—it means something. We’ve been here the whole time. Pull up a chair.