Ayu's best 10 PVs- 1.《Surreal》

I started doing a review on the (My opinion) 
best 10 Ayumi Hamasaki’s videos :D 

Title numbers only reflect chronological order.

They are chosen not only because of the graphics (although most of them are eye candy) and beats, but the matching of the song theme also counts. Entire personal interpretation, additional thoughts welcome.

《Surreal》, 2000

is almost like the first promotional music video I viewed from Ayumi Hamasaki, I downloaded from Winmix, a sharing platform that nobody is using nowadays. It was like a production at the two thousand year, but a good concept just doesn't get old.

Youtube version(Official, 2 minutes):

Brief content, plus my personal comment:

At the opening of this PV, a barbie-like girl(Ayu) is sleeping, wearing a long white dress and everything is looking innocent.

When she wakes up in the middle of the dream(still dreaming?), she goes on the seashore, and sees all those new and “surreal” things, e.g. marine warship, weird flowers, hard rocks. 

It is just like a girl coming into society and starting to know a lot of things, a process as growth.

The climax is when she goes into a jungle and meet a leopard girl(of course is another character played by her). When she wakes up again, she gets the leopard’s red eyes. Instead of going into the rocks and jungle, this time, she(maybe with the memory about the dream?) directly goes towards the middle of the sea and camera fades out.

This is a song that blew my mind when I was a teenager.

Very Ayu-ish style in the early stage of her career, as later, she really did a lot videos about karma and destiny sort of philosophic themes. Fit in “Surreal” Lyrics very well: 

Stay true to your choices, and walk the walk strongly, even you are alone and unprotected.

(#from an interview in her biography, Ayu said, at the time about to produce this song, she was inspired by a dry lake and wishing everything could keep unchanged.)

Full video(4:50 minutes):
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjY2ODk2MDg=.html



Credit: http://www.eneabba.net/ayu/video/videoclips/18.Surreal.htm