Carmen

The clip for "Carmen", the sixth single on the "Racine Carrée" album, is a cartoon clip which was drawn and animated entirely by Sylvain Chomet, who created the masterpiece "Les triplettes de Belleville".

The idea behind the clip was to use the blue Twitter bird to personify the cult of self worship which is encouraged by today's types of communication. In the clip the bird is seen with Stromae's cartoon alter-ego - the alter-ego is depicted in a crazy competition against others and against himself to have the most followers, influence, recognition, love…

The official Instagram account of Stromae's unhappy alter-ago was launched at the same time as the video. We weren't interested in using Instagram in particular, but we saw it as a move towards an alternative stance and that made the subject recursive.

Sylvain Chomet has since done many drawings to make people believe that an animated, narcissistic Stromae really exists behind the Instagram account and at the same time Chomet plays with and exaggerates the codes, clichés and by-products of this well-known social network. His drawings tell the story of the gradual fall of the character into this vicious circle of self worship, right up to a symbolic death.

"The original idea of the characters riding the blue birds (symbolizing our crazy attempts to get followers) came to Orelsan in the studio. He had thought of this before and it came to his mind when we were finishing the piece off."