Nora Fatehi’s latest music video has been creating chatter online- and a lot of it is about the similarities it shares with an international show.
Body Roll, produced by Nora and starring her along with Yo Yo Honey Singh, dropped online on May 9. It features her as an apsara. Social media has been drawing comparisons with the Netflix animated show Love Death and Robots, specifically the episode titled Jibaro, in Volume 3.
Nora’s post about the song on Instagram has been flooded with comments like “Copying the theme and dress attire from Love*Death & Robots- Jibaro episode. Truly innovative”, while another read “That’s love,death and robots. That siren and Jibaro !”
HT City reaches out to the director of Body Roll, Inflict (Prakarsh Tiwari) and he exclusively tells us that they were inspired indeed. He says, “I am inspired by a lot of cinema, art, music videos, mythology, fashion, animation from all around the world. So there are definitely fantasy and surrealist influences which people may connect with. But this project was created with it’s own emotional language, it has a different storyline altogether. I agree that there’s inspiration from Jibaro for that matter.”
Also read: Nora Fatehi, Honey Singh’s Body Roll music video identical to Love Death + Robots? Internet calls it ‘full fledged copy’
But he adds that the concept of an ‘apsara’ has existed in Indian mythology for a long time. “Body Roll is a music video. If people are comparing it to something like Jibaro which is so huge and award-winning, that would not be a fair comparison. On the other hand, while it’s a compliment because people are saying we recreated Jibaro, I disagree with it. If you see the whole music video, you will realise that the storyline is very different,” he says on the overall concept. As for the similar costumes, Inflict shares there was logic behind Nora dressing the way she does in the music video of Body Roll.
“If we are treating a lake as a sacred place, and Nora Fatehi comes out of it, using fabric wouldn’t have looked nice. So you need metals. I had two options to go with- either a lot of jewellery, a metal based costume, or coins. We use both the costumes in the video. So inspiration has always been a part of filmmaking. What matters is how you reinterpret emotions and create something that resonates with people in your own voice. This wasn’t about recreating something frame to frame,” he signs off.