My Chemical Romance have joined Lauren Tsai, Billie Eilish and Phoebe Bridgers for “Prelude to the End”, a seven-minute animated film released on October 29. It follows a girl searching for her treasured sketchbook through a world of forgotten ideas. Hand-drawn images, animated figures and music from “The Black Parade” shape a story about protecting something personal when the surrounding world insists it has no value.
My Chemical Romance and Lauren Tsai begin “Prelude to the End” with a sketchbook that matters deeply to its owner. To somebody else, Astrid’s drawings might seem disposable. For her, losing them means losing something she has created and wants to keep. That disagreement sets the short film’s journey in motion, turning an ordinary possession into the centre of an unfamiliar world.
Astrid lives at Paper Academy, a strict New England boarding school governed by peculiar rules. When the school’s authorities take her beloved sketchbook, it ends up in the rubbish chute. She refuses to abandon it and follows the same route, leaving the classrooms behind in search of an object the institution has decided to discard.
Her search leads to a place where forgotten ideas acquire physical forms and reality follows different rules. Strange creatures and unsettling images resemble parts of a childhood nightmare. One sequence connects Astrid with a giant raven, allowing her to fly with it before a plush creature abruptly interrupts their flight. The journey passes through things other people have rejected.
Tsai directs the film and supplies Astrid’s voice. Billie Eilish plays the central character’s friend, while Phoebe Bridgers voices her sister. Their involvement with My Chemical Romance takes the form of acting within the story. They do not appear as singers on a newly announced musical collaboration, and their roles connect them to the people Astrid can turn towards.
The cast also brings together figures from other creative fields. Video-game creator Hideo Kojima voices a severe teacher, while John C. McGinley plays the headmaster. His character reminds Astrid of the institution’s rules, including prohibitions on fantasising and instructions to remove rubbish. Those commands establish a setting that gives little welcome to the girl’s imagination.
My Chemical Romance connect the film to “The Black Parade” through the 2006 album’s opening track, “The End.” The song accompanies Astrid’s story within a work that extends beyond a conventional performance video. An album already concerned with loss, fear and endings meets a narrative about holding on to something personally valuable instead of allowing it to disappear.
The visual approach combines handmade drawings with animated figures, producing an environment that can feel childlike and disturbing at once. School interiors, unusual creatures and transitions between scenes build the impression of an illustrated nightmare. The familiar voices contribute to that world, but much of the storytelling comes from what Astrid sees and the choices she makes. Across the film, the school and the world beneath it offer sharply different surroundings. Astrid begins under the authority of adults who want her drawings removed, then encounters a place where discarded things persist. The contrast keeps her practical search visible through the changing images: she is still looking for the same missing notebook.
The character and her surroundings have a history before this collaboration. Astrid appeared in Tsai’s earlier “The Dying World Part One: Forgetting”, presented at the Annecy animation festival in 2025. “Prelude to the End” continues that creative world, adding characters and connecting its imagery with the music of My Chemical Romance rather than introducing an entirely unrelated setting.
Tsai had also directed the video for boygenius’s “Cool About It”. Bridgers performs in that group alongside Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, providing another connection within the new film’s creative network. The filmmaker’s own visual language remains central, bringing earlier characters and experience in music-related animation into this seven-minute work.
For Tsai, working with My Chemical Romance also carries a personal history. When she was younger, she made her own animated videos using the band’s songs. Years later, she found herself directing a project with them. She described the collaboration as a dream realised, explaining her admiration for Gerard Way and the creative world the group has developed.
The soundtrack also includes a live recording of Pascal Dusapin’s “Flying River, Violin Concerto”, performed by the Utopia Orchestra with violin soloist Daniel Lozakovich. This orchestral contribution sits alongside “The End.”, expanding the film’s musical setting. Production came through Tsai’s independent studio, UNREAL INC., with her artwork and characters remaining at the heart of the project.
The release forms part of the 20th-anniversary celebrations for “The Black Parade”, arriving a few days after an expanded anniversary edition of the album. My Chemical Romance scheduled the film to screen before their final two Hollywood Bowl concerts in Los Angeles, on October 30 and 31. Those screenings place the short within the band’s live anniversary events.
“Prelude to the End” is a distinct collaboration, rather than an announcement of a new studio album. It puts existing music into contact with Tsai’s story and visual imagination, following a girl who refuses to leave her drawings behind. Astrid’s search for the sketchbook gives that connection a concrete purpose: recovering something she values in a place that has dismissed it.
IMAGE_CREDIT: My Chemical Romance / Lauren Tsai / YouTube
