Stanley Donwood explains the Kid A bears and blips to Creative Review

Stanley Donwood, who makes Radiohead's artwork, directed the animated blips that stand in for singles from Kid A, and he tells Creative Review he is glad that eight or nine have already got out, hacked from an EMI server. Eight or nine have been hacked out of a secure server at EMI that wasn't really very secure: that's a really nice way for them to go out.¹ He likes the fan sites too, because they do all the stuff we don't want to do, like put up the news that fans are actually interested in¹.

There will be no single from Kid A, out in Britain on 2 October, and no pop videos. In their place, blips of 10 to 40 seconds carrying pieces of the album will run in TV ad breaks and on MTV. Donwood wants them disposable, and says a four-minute film seems bloated by comparison. they're meant to be throwaway, not works of art... they'll just be on between Jif Micro Liquid and Volvo¹

He gave the animators photographs of his paintings and sketchbook pages nobody has seen. Half the blips are by Chris Bran, who worked on the band's webcasts last year, and half by the animation team Shynola, directed by Richard Kenworthy. Kenworthy's team spent a week with the album and the pictures before making anything, and he calls the results political and pessimistic, about war, death and the damage done to the earth. For one blip he built Thom Yorke's head out of hundreds of photographs of Yorke found on the internet.

Donwood started on the art soon after OK Computer came out, wanting to get away from that sleeve's white, scratchy look, and worked alongside the band as the songs were written and rewritten. He painted ten canvases, six feet square, in Artex, and they were photographed, scanned and combined with computer graphics and drawings from old sketchbooks.

The bears that run through all of it come from a bedtime story Donwood told his daughter, in which forgotten toys rise up and eat the adults; they first appeared in Modified Organisms, the online cartoon strip he drew with Yorke. He also wanted Peter and Jane, the children of the 1950s Ladybird reading books, in one of his paintings, and the magazine says Ladybird refused. A wireframe monster stalks the image the magazine calls Austria. The dinosaurs roaming the earth are like these rapacious corporations storming over the planet and chewing it up¹