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Imagine Dragons – Birds (Animated Video)

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A father-daughter bedtime story turned into one of Imagine Dragons’ most personal music videos.

On July 24, 2019, Imagine Dragons dropped the official animated video for “Birds” on the band’s ImagineDragonsVEVO YouTube channel, trading arena pyrotechnics for hand-drawn 2D animation and a story about a mother, a child, and a pair of wings. The track first surfaced on the deluxe edition of 2018’s Origins, but the video gives it a completely new life as a short film rather than a straightforward performance clip.

• The video was directed and scripted by animator Zac Wong, running just over three and a half minutes in hand-drawn 2D animation.
• “Birds” was produced by Joel Little and co-written by Dan Reynolds, Wayne Sermon, Ben McKee, and Daniel Platzman alongside Little for the deluxe edition of Origins (2018).
• The animated video accompanies the original album version of the song, arriving shortly after an alternate single featuring Italian singer Elisa.

The Story Zac Wong Chose to Tell

Rather than illustrate the lyrics literally, Wong built an entirely original narrative around them. A young child discovers they come from a family with the ability to sprout feathers and wings, an inheritance that sets them apart from everyone around them. It’s the kind of premise that could easily play as a fantasy adventure, but Wong keeps the focus small and domestic instead, centered on the relationship between the child and their mother.

The mother becomes the guide through the film, teaching the child to accept the traits that make them different rather than hide them. That guidance builds toward the moment the child finally takes flight alongside her, a sequence animated with the same warmth Wong brings to the quieter, grounded scenes earlier in the video.

A Gift That Doubles as a Goodbye

After their flight together, the mother gives the child a bird pendant, a small object that carries the weight of everything the film has been building toward. It’s a quiet transfer, not a dramatic reveal, and that restraint is part of why the moment lands.

Birds fly in different directions, I hope to see you again.

That line, lifted straight from the song, doubles as the video’s thesis. The narrative pushes into the separation and eventual loss of the mother, forcing the child to reconcile the freedom of flight with the reality that flying, by definition, means eventually flying apart. Wong uses the pendant as the physical anchor for that idea, a keepsake that stays behind once the mother doesn’t.

Context Within the Origins Era

“Birds” never got the singles-chart push of tracks like “Natural” or “Bad Liar” off the same album cycle, which made the decision to give it a dedicated animated short somewhat unexpected. The Elisa-featuring alternate version had already given the song a second life internationally before this video arrived, but the band opted to pair the original album cut with Wong’s film rather than the collaboration.

It’s a choice that fits the themes of individuality and acceptance running through the lyrics — themes that plenty of other artists have leaned on animation to explore, the same way Diane Guerrero and Stephanie Beatriz did with “What Else Can I Do?” years later. For a band whose live shows and videos usually lean toward scale and spectacle, “Birds” is a deliberate step toward something smaller and more intimate.

The pairing of a hand-drawn short with an album deep cut also says something about how Imagine Dragons have handled their catalog outside the obvious singles, a pattern worth watching against how other acts, examined in pieces like Musicians That Are Nothing Like They Seem, treat the songs that never got the full promotional push the first time around.

Current Standing of the Song

With the animated video live, “Birds” has two distinct visual identities in circulation — Wong’s short film for the album version, and whatever treatment eventually surrounds the Elisa duet. For a track that started as a deluxe-edition bonus cut, that’s a longer afterlife than most album filler ever gets, and it’s a good bet Wong’s ending, mother’s pendant and all, is the version fans keep coming back to.