The soundtrack for this Platform Animation Festival promo is so breathtakingly perfect it’s hard to imagine that two guys rolled it together in a week. From the moment the little white cube falls from its stack, it’s met, tumble-for-tumble, with globs of organ and big fat garage riffs. Til the end, the British sound design duo Brains & Hunch continue to plow through their toolbox, seemingly keeping our rectangular protagonist in motion through continued bursts of sonic momentum.
“The Guideline[s] were always about energy, narrative drive and making sure nothing was too predictable,” Tom Haines told adReverb. He and his creative partner, Chris Branch, were commissioned by Smith and Foulkes to write a piece that could withstand numerous listens from festival-goers, as it was to be used as the Ident for the six-day show held this past June in Portland, Ore.
While figuring out how to string the box along, Haines and Branch listened to (adReverb favorite) The Boredoms, Minor Threat, and, of course, famed “Pink Panther” composer/arranger Henry Mancini for inspiration. They also got a chance to watch all the rough animation cuts as they were assembled, and so, “one thing fed the other and vice versa,” as Haines put it.
Brains & Hunch, who met while studying at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, have lent their gifts to so many enterprises that I’m not sure where to start or stop; instead, check out their amazing rendition of The Omen’s theme song played with kitchen utensils!!
Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies,
Don’t fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,
Don’t fence me in.
This spot, by Clemmow, Hornby, Inge, London, was directed Simon Ratigan, who also created the mystifying Vodafone advert featured here recently. Ratigan has a peculiar way of channeling nostalgia for simpler, probably fictional times, when not only advertising but life seemed as honest and manageable as taking one’s horse through ragged plains, and fences, not strip malls, were the only impediments to travel.
Because it was also a time when, at least in our imaginations, chickens and cows and pigs roamed free, and fences, not cages, were the only barriers to their freedom. We didn’t need anthropomorphic animals and Second Life furries to know that we weren’t that different from cows. Although none of us was ever anything like Bing Crosby.
There was more than a little nail-biting among Fruity Pebblers when Kellogg announced that they weren’t going to run TV ads for unhealthy kids’ cereal anymore. But look at the results!
Thanks to a little Donavon song and a few overzealous children, Fruity Cheerios looks so fun you’ll have to keep the kids from leaping straight into their milk and getting flung down the gullet of some hungry giant! But seriously, Innertubes are still dangerous, kids, even if they now have a little bit of real fruit juice in each one.
As ludicrous as it is, someone had their ears open when they picked “Happiness Runs” (see box at right), because the chorus —”Happiness runs in a circular motion”— is precious and perfect enough to fit this still-sugary pitch.
So by now, everyone and their dry cleaner has seen OK GO’s choreographed backyard video and the subsequent treadmill retread. Now rumor has it (via YouTube comments, always a reliable source of first-hand accounts from film crews… or not) that the band has finally discarded their viral Fosse aspirations and actually said no to Riva, whose agency, Colman Rasic Carrasco, wanted them to dance around a supermarket to hawk instant coffee in Australia.
I’ve got my own gripes with the crystals my parent dissolve into liquid sheetrock every morning, but it’s a good thing that the New South Wales band The Paper Scissors signed on instead. According to their promotion company, A New Entity, the song is (possibly a different take of) their new track “Tipped Hat” from the band’s forthcoming album, Less Talk, More Paper Scissors, arriving this August.
Not only is this the first peek anyone’s gotten from the new album —they already have two excellent e.p.’s under their belt— but it’s also an exciting departure from their oeuvre. Over a spiraling, breakneck-livekit-cowbell beat, Paper Scissors break down with a Bootsy Collins baseline and shouty vocals. As the shopping trolleys are spinning and flavor crystals are cascading onto the floor, the track flares up and crashes into something altogether magnificent and fairly stupid. It’s obviously great, and has already inspired the always spot-on “Chaser’s War on Everything” to respond.
And, wisely, so has the band, once again, via a Youtube comment:
Yo it is a song called ‘Tipped Hat’ by The Paper Scissors. It will be on our album ‘Less Talk, More Paper Scissors’ coming out August. We are sellouts! Woot woot! Everyone is ripping off everyone/ OkGo ripped off Spike Jonze anyway. haters.
xo
myspace dot com slash thepaperscissors
Look closely. Those are watch parts. Falling to the beat of “Little April Shower” (see box at right), a campy gem BBH London plucked from Disney’s original 1942 Bambi film for this recent TV spot. The effect is pure kitsch, endearingly applied to announce the arrival of new Internet service for Vodafone in the UK.
Removed from the context of the movie —I’m not sure I could tell time when I last saw it, but I have a feeling that my eyes would have been transfixed by the clock anyway— it’s a startlingly bizarre track. A steady oboe-and-triangle beat drips down like drops from suburban drainpipes, which carefully leads into string-mimicked verses by joyous choruses of men and women. Halfway through, it turns stormier and stormier, and more cacophonous by each measure until, well… you get the point. It’s a smart choice from a largely forgotten soundtrack, and it somehow injects emotion into a tech product launch, a daring feat.
The underlying irony of this whole ad is that we can have the world in our hand, yet our wrists still convey information through a complex arrangement of tiny gears, a quaint throwback that most of us would rather not leave on the dresser when we leave for work in the morning. Much like an umbrella on a drizzly April morning or memories of The Mouse’s golden years.
This Japanese spot isn’t so much focused on the music as it is on nostalgia for some genre of 1960’s television shows that only seem vaguely familiar to me because of Quentin Tarantino. Essentially, Coca-Cola, that delightful brand of union-quashing, diabetes-inducing soda, has created a robot to walk Tokyo dispensing product to perplexed customers. Only in Japan, folks… unfortunately.
The ads that were created to promote this thirst-quenching monstrosity are amazing and as authentic-looking as I can guess, right down to the soundtrack. With a gargantuan-sounding horn section and jagged, spaghetti Western guitar riffs, it sounds like source material from the Go! Team. It’s completely awesome, although the concepts loses its luster by the third “episode.” Check out the first:
Seriously, this is one of the dumbest ads that the #1 deodorant brand in America has ever done. It’s absurd and well-shot and follows the insane branding that Axe has cultivated, but seriously: Average-looking girls colliding like Power Rangers to form gorgeous hotties just because they think this guy and his deodorant are hot? It’s almost funny, in a Family Circus smirking kind of way. But not quite.
The song in the Vega Olmos Ponce ad for Axe 3’s launch in Argentina, of course, is much better than its curious pretext. “Yarde of Blonde Girls,” (see box @ right) originally written and performed by Jeff Buckley (w/ Inger Lorre of the Nymphs), but here played by Micah P. Hinson. In the context of this ad, the thrust of the song, about a genuinely beautiful girl beaming out from our “world of lies,” is completely subverted. Hinson’s exhortations to “run” are met literally, with ladies leaping towards one another in a kamikaze gestalt makeover of their physical features. We don’t know if they’ve suddenly become better people in the process, but we can probably assume that the most beautiful curves of their personalities have merged too, right?
Apparently this ad is from last August. Oops! Watch it anyway.
… Drag-U-La has to be the Ford Mondeo. This latest British advert by Ogilvy London, which shows a city full of people sending their cars into the stratosphere, and it gives me the willies. With any other soundtrack —the Polyphonic Spree anyone?— it could have been cute and liberating, like people were finally cutting loose the expensive polluting albatrosses from their necks. But no. Someone decided to literally yank some score from … Donnie Darko.
As the sedans go drifting away, we’re reminded by the sombre Nocturne-like piano chords of “The Artifact and the Living” (see box at right) that something is eerily amiss in this montage. The digital bells vibrate horrifically and we’re left wondering “Is it good that our cars are gone? Or are we sad to see them drift into the heavens?” And then, suddenly, the Mondeo appears, and we realize that people haven’t been casting off the shackles of their autos because they are destroying the earth or because they de-humanize us or because they make commuting hell, but —of course!— because their cars are not Mondeos.
Maybe it’s just the indelible associations created by the creepy movie, but, despite the elegance and poignancy of this and the rest of the Donnie Darko score and the fact that it literally works in the ad, this seems an unfortunate choice for moving cars.
What better way to promote a car company than by removing the car? Although Toyota has the best environmental record of any auto manufacturer and produces as much as 80% of the nation’s hybrid cars, it still makes sense these days to stress the freewheeling benefits and high-speed romance of travel instead of the carbon-coughing smog we know so well. Shot in Prague by Dentsu and imbued with a cascade of European provincialism, this spot also borrows a whiff of Old World Europe via America’s Beirut.
Upon sitting in a simple wooden chair, an accordion melody from “Scenic World” (see right) lifts a man into a bustling square with arguing men and a quaint child who sells him a newspaper. He gets what looks like an after-dinner mint at a restaurant and spends the next minute fishing and falling in love —all from the seat of his chair. It’s a surreal, sorta-gooey touch of Gondry that works wonderfully because of the song’s anthemic themes and proud, almost-nationalistic horn arrangements.
The only off note is the closing tagline: “Something the internet can’t do … meet.” So, like … What!? Not only is this grammatically ludicrous, but who’s going to respond positively to such a patronizing enjoinder to go outside and play?
For a band like Wilco, TV commercials can be a backdoor to otherwise barricaded TV sets. Some of the Chicago (my hometown) band’s fans have cried foul, but, like in most commercials, the song in this VW ad —and the Wilco material in as many as four more ads— is anonymous to all but true fans. To anyone who doesn’t own singer Jeff Tweedy’s solo live DVD, Sunken Treasure, “The Thanks I Get” (see box on right) is just a pleasant-if-confusing southern-rock rambler for a cute little advert about a tow truck driver whose heart melts for someone else’s Volkswagen.
But it’s a strange choice, juxtaposing Tweedy’s cynicism about lending out one’s heart with a commercial begging one to do just that. Maybe the lesson is that a VW is more dependable than a lover? They might be onto something, although I’d wager that Wilco is more dependable than love or automobiles.
