Billie Eilish, Phoebe Bridgers Voice My Chemical Romance's New Short

Artist Lauren Tsai, who made fan videos for the band as a kid, built 'Prelude to The End' around 'The End.'

Billie Eilish plays the friend and Phoebe Bridgers plays the sister in My Chemical Romance's new animated short, and neither of them is the lead.

That part belongs to Lauren Tsai, the self-taught artist behind "Prelude to The End," who as a kid made animated fan videos for the band's songs, Rolling Stone reported. The short came out Thursday, Pitchfork reported, and it'll play before the band's last two Hollywood Bowl shows, Friday and Saturday, which close out five straight nights there.

Tsai voices Astrid, a student at a strange New England boarding school that's overrun by trash. When the grown-ups in charge throw her beloved sketchbook down a chute, she goes in after it and ends up in a world of forgotten ideas. The song under all of it is "The End," the first track on The Black Parade, which the band reissued for the album's 20th anniversary the Friday before.

The supporting cast only gets stranger from there. Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima is the voice of the Teacher, and the Dean, the scary man at the top, belongs to John C. McGinley, according to Consequence. Tsai's own studio, UNREAL INC., produced the film.

Astrid isn't new. Her story started in The Dying World, Tsai's short that debuted at the Annecy Film Festival last year. Tsai later grew that world into a solo show at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, which wrapped last November, according to Rolling Stone. So the band didn't hand a fan its world. It walked into hers.

Tsai put it that way herself. In a statement, she said it was "an honor for him to find inspiration in a world that I've created," meaning frontman Gerard Way, the same way she'd always admired the worlds he's built.

For Bridgers, Thursday was a double release. That same day she put out Live at Madison Square Garden, a Tidal-exclusive EP of five songs from her album Lost Weekend, Rolling Stone reported. It was recorded at a June show that Tidal sponsored, where tickets cost $1 and phones weren't allowed.

She's also closing the North American leg of her tour with three sold-out shows at Intuit Dome this weekend, Halloween included. So on Halloween night, Astrid's sister will be onstage across town while the Bowl crowd watches her chase a sketchbook into the dark.

Source: Rolling Stone, retrieved October 30, 2026. Other sources: Wikipedia: Hideo Kojima, consequence.net, Wikipedia: My Chemical Romance, Rolling Stone (2).