Don't F**k With Love is a stop-motion animated music video with a pessimistic streak. The message seems to be that love will always come back to bite you in the end. Or, more generally, that no good deed goes unpunished.
The video is presented as a storybook. The characters are dressed in 1920s clothes and appear in pop-up books. In the first segment, we see a young couple enjoying a country picnic when the dude gets struck by lightning. The girl doesn't fare much better, when the sequence ends and the book closes on her head. In the second segment, the characters are recast as city folk. The dude tries to be a gentleman by putting his coat down over a puddle so the girl doesn't get her feet wet, and he gets flattened by a car. Most cars topped out at 50mph back then, so he still might be okay.
The video has been wonderfully directed by Rachel McIntosh and Jim Starace. The tone and lighting evoke an earlier era and give the characters a kind of innocence, which becomes funny when the word "f**k" appears repeatedly on the soundtrack. There's a wicked-cool practical effect that causes the characters' heads to rotate suddenly, and another one where the girl's eyes spin like the reels on a slot machine. I've never seen anything quite like that. The song is by The Sad Little Stars, and they sound like a folksier, more cynical version of Simon & Garfunkel.
