DIY troubadour Willis Earl Beal has produced a short animation featuring pencil-drawn cameos from Barack Obama and Lionel Richie.

Premiering on Nowness, Principles of a Protagonist is part autobiography and part fantasy, with Beal exploring bleak themes of heartbreak and ennui against a backdrop of a storm heading for his birth city of Chicago.

Based on a short novel written by Beal in 2010 and distributed as a zine, the animation also makes clever use of found sound, clips from news reports and phone calls, and snippets of haunting music.

Explaining the titular protagonist to Nowness, Beal was not exactly cheerful: “He knowingly constructs a set of principles that ultimately must dissolve within a meaningless void like the perceived order of life into the uncertainty of death.”

Beal’s 2012 debut album, Acousmatic Sorcery was described by FACT’s Steve Shaw as “fantastically odd”. More recently, Beal’s been in trouble with the law after allegedly kicking a homeless man in the face during a performance in the Netherlands.

Watch the animation below. [via Dummy]