Oh, Katy Perry Vanquishes Paparazzi and Prince Charming in New 'Wide Awake' Music Video

Perry's wide-eyed, innocent inner child has special protective powers.

Perry's superhero-esque music video character is accompanied by a wide-eyed little girl who represents the singer's inner child—the one whose hopes and dreams she's attempting to achieve. Perry explained, "[Of] course there's been a lot of things that went on last year that I had to get through and overcome and obstacles that I had to, you know, go through, and I think what probably kept me going is just the purity of my belief in music and my love for music and that's kind of like, the younger version of me."

In the video, the obstacles are presented in the form of intrusive and aggressive paparazzi, who are only vanquished when Perry pushes back at them from behind a mirror. There are also terrifying minotaurs who are pushed away at the insistence of Perry's childlike self, and a dapper prince charming who tries to pull one over on Perry, only to get clocked in the face.

Perry wrote the song for her upcoming 3D concert film Part of Me to make a statement about what's real: "This song in particular is kind of like a dose of reality, it's kind of like coming down from a high—you've been on Cloud 9 for so long, but it can't always be so sweet, and so times you need to realize that, and you have to pick yourself up and move forward and face the facts of life, and know that this is just a lesson you learn and you're stronger because of it."

Katy Perry dropped her new fairy tale-themed music video for "Wide Awake" on Monday evening, a day earlier than she'd planned, opening the gates to speculation about which aspects of her new music video address her recent split from comedian Russell Brand.

The speculation isn't exactly unfair. Though Perry's new video is set in a colorful, labyrinthine dream world, it is highly autobiographical. The star explained in a post-premiere interview with MTV's Sway: "It's kind of like the labyrinth of my life in the past two years, and I just wanted to tell a story about myself kind of going through this journey, maybe sometimes trying to get out of the maze, and there's good parts, there's bad parts."