My Chemical Romance has released a new 7-minute stop-motion animated short in collaboration with Lauren Tsai, creator of the series The Dying World. It also includes a surprising mix of voice talents, including Billie Eilish, Phoebe Bridgers, and Hideo Kojima. What a group.
The stunning animation is part of a celebration for the 20th anniversary of The Black Parade, one of the band’s more notable albums. It’s not entirely clear if the video teases anything beyond that.
The short revolves around a young girl named Astrid (voiced by Tsai herself), who, at the start, is being reprimanded by the Dean of Paper Academy for drawing “that thing.” Across the video, we see more of what that thing exactly is, as it takes an interesting turn into horror. At one point, Astrid checks the voicemails on her phone, where Billie Eilish plays her friend, Phoebe Bridgers plays her sister, and Hideo Kojima plays her Japanese teacher.
Kojima has been a self-professed My Chemical Romance fan for decades, and quite vocal about it. Over the years, he’s made multiple posts about the band, including one in 2022 where he went to a My Chemical Romance concert and got complimented on his shirt. Considering Kojima’s love of collaboration, he likely jumped at the chance for this cameo.
But Kojima has also recently collaborated with Lauren Tsai, as she played the character “The Artist” in Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, with the character even sporting her likeness. In it, the side character asks Sam Porter Bridges to find her some drawing materials for her illustrations. Death Stranding 2 was one of the most critically acclaimed games of 2025. Our own review gave it a 9/10, stating “Death Stranding 2: On The Beach takes its predecessor’s foundation and builds a bigger, better game on top—keeping everything that worked, and improving what didn’t 10-fold.”
In an interview with IndieWire, Tsai shed more light on the creation of the short and its message. The Dying World is envisioned as a sort of “trash dump for discarded thoughts.”
“I was interested in someone who might have slipped into being forgotten themselves while they were still alive,” Tsai explained, “so that’s Astrid. And Astrid is able to go between these two realms, although in my mind the Dying World and the real world are all one place,” Tsai tells IndieWire. “The reason for choosing stop-motion,” Tsai said, “is that I wanted to see something visually on the screen that felt like the way I remember a lot of my own memories. I was exposed to ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ and that kind of movement at an early age, but there’s also a texture to memory that’s impossible to put into words. I wanted to figure out what the texture of my own memory might look like.”
