My Chemical Romance Release Prelude to the End, an Animated Short With Phoebe Bridgers, Billie Eilish and Hideo Kojima

My Chemical Romance spent their 20th-anniversary party making a cartoon about a girl who falls down a garbage chute, and the cast is absurd. Prelude to the End, a seven-minute animated short released Thursday (Oct. 29), is voiced by Phoebe Bridgers, Billie Eilish, video game designer Hideo Kojima and actor John C. McGinley, Pitchfork reports. Watch it below.

Visual artist Lauren Tsai directed it, and she also voices its lead, Astrid, a student at a repressive New England boarding school called the Paper Academy. After the headmaster confiscates her sketchbook, Astrid tumbles down a trash chute to find it and lands in a world of old ideas come to life, Billboard says. Bridgers voices her sister, Eilish a close friend, Kojima the strict Teacher and McGinley the iron-fisted Dean. The film is stop-motion and hand-drawn, and it runs on “The End,” the turbulent opening track of The Black Parade. Its score includes a live recording of Pascal Dusapin’s Flying River, Violin Concerto, played by the Utopia Orchestra.

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It is a sequel of sorts to Tsai’s 2025 short The Dying World Part One: Forgetting, which also starred Astrid and debuted at the Annecy Festival last June. Tsai also directed the animated video for the Boygenius song “Cool About It.” A press release describes the new short as a film that: Bridgers, who played a phone-free show at Madison Square Garden in June, as we covered, is also in our Best Original Song race explainer.

explores the relationships we all hold with our creations, youth and the unwavering determination to become and express our truth, the latter of which in particular is a key, recurring theme throughout My Chemical Romance’s catalog.

Press release, via Billboard, Billboard

For Tsai, who made her own animated fan videos for MCR songs as a kid, this was a lifelong ambition. “It was an absolute dream to work on this project for The Black Parade and The Dying World,” she said in a statement. “I deeply respect MCR and Gerard’s creative legacy. It has been an honor for him to find inspiration in a world that I’ve created, in the same way I have always admired the worlds that he has built throughout his career.”

The film arrives just after the band released a 20th-anniversary edition of The Black Parade with bonus tracks, per Billboard. It will screen before the final two nights of MCR’s five-night Hollywood Bowl residency, Friday (Oct. 30) and Saturday (Oct. 31), part of a tour celebrating the album’s 20th year that began in 2025.

Added to the High Grailed archive on November 10, 2026.