About

Shelter is a collaborative electropop song by American music producer Porter Robinson and French music producer Madeon. The song was originally released on August 11, 2016, but would gain a larger amount of online traction and notoriety with an anime short film released as the song's music video on October 18, 2016.

Origin

In an article from Billboard^[1], Madeon states in a press release “Both Porter and I started working with people in-person when we started making our respective albums and appreciated how much more collaborative you can get. Our intent was to make music that would reflect our friendship.” Released on August 11, 2016 as a single through Columbia Records and Madeon's vanity record label popcultur, "Shelter" was uploaded to both Youtube and Soundcloud the same day accompanied by the announcement of a back-to-back North American live tour similar to both Porter's and Madeon's previous live tours for their albums Worlds and Adventure respectively.

On October 14, 2016, Porter announced through his social media accounts^[2][3] that an anime music video/short film would be produced for the song entitled "Shelter: The Animation" in collaboration with Japanese production company A-1 Pictures, known for their production of several manga and light novel adaptations such as Sword Art Online, Oreimo, and Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day.

The video (shown above) premiered in Japan at 10:15 PM local time in Tokyo's Shibuya district^[4], and would make its worldwide premiere at 2PM Eastern on Youtube and anime streaming service Crunchyroll. In its first week, the video garnered over 4 million views on Youtube, and in the span of 3 months, received over 12 million views. On December 31 at midnight, the video was aired on Toonami before a Dragon Ball Z Kai marathon.^[28] The music video tells the story of Rin, a 17-year old girl living alone in a simulation she has complete control over via a tablet, who later discovers the origin of her current predicaments, past, personal relationship with her father, and the lengths her father would go in terms of love.

Reception

Both the song and music video were very positively received. Ryan Middleton writing for Music Times^[5] described the song as "what fans of both artists have been hoping for," and that "It manages to bring together the sounds of both artists – Porter Robinson and his synth wizardry found on Worlds and then similar shimmering synths that Madeon has used over the years." In the aforementioned Billboard article^[1], Kat Bein writes "'Shelter' is luscious. It gushes perfection. It's sweet and fun. Their styles are perfectly matched, their quality indisputable." Ryan Reed, writing for Rolling Stone, described the track as "silky electro-pop" and "full of spiraling effects and pitch-shifted hooks."^[27]

The music video garnered over 452,000 likes on Youtube as of January 2017, while also getting an 8.4 user rating out of 10 from over 55,000 users on MyAnimeList.^[6] and a 5-star user rating on Crunchyroll from 3985 votes.^[15] Dani of music blog Nest HQ^[7] said "Both the record and the film are abstruse works of art; the idea that a father would create a space where his daughter could exist in infinite peace, safety, and wonder, triggers a wave of introspection about my own family, relationships, and ultimately about existence itself."

Spread

Fan art (examples shown below) for the music video and the collaboration exist on places like Tumblr, under tags such as "shelter"^[8], "shelter the animation"^[9], "shelter anime"^[10] and "shelter" followed by "porter robinson"^[11] or "madeon"^[12]. On Deviantart, searching for "shelter porter" nets 596 results^[13], though more results could be found using other search terms pertaining to the subject. The video was also posted to various subreddits, such as /r/Anime, where it received over 11,000 upvotes, becoming the most upvoted post in/r/anime at that time,^[14] and the third-most upvoted post submitted there overall.

Video reviews discussing the video itself and dissecting the meaning of the video have also been posted to Youtube (example shown below, left) while fans of Porter have also speculated about connections between the music video and other songs made by him, such as "Sad Machine" and "Goodbye to a World", both of which deal with themes of the end of the world, along with creating recreations of live edits of songs used by both artists in their back-to-back live tour (example shown below, right).

/r/Anime Takedown Controversy

On the same day after the music video was posted to /r/Anime, moderators of the sub removed the original post for the music video along with consequent posts of and about the music video, disallowing any discussion about it and going so far as to implementing a bot (shown below, first) to automatically remove any related posts. In a later post, moderator DrNyanpasu justified the removal of the original post stating that the music video did not fit the criteria to be considered anime (shown below, second).

This drew a large backlash from among /r/Anime and /r/porterrobinson^[16], along with responses from Porter Robinson himself^[17], his brother, Polygon writer Nick Robinson^[18], animator and Game Grumps member Ross O'Donovan^[19][20], and other noted electronic musicians such as Jon Gooch, also known as Feed Me^[21][22], and Justin Blau, also known as 3LAU.^[23] The controversy was reported by Moviepilot^[24] and Kotaku^[25] and also started a debate on what constituted as anime as a result of the takedown. The original post would later be reinstated, though the moderators claimed that death threats were sent their way during the controversy.^[26]

Search Interest

External References