Last year, it seemed that some of the biggest brands had declared the death of the opulent, magical holiday advert. AI slop would do, they decided.
Coca-Cola's AI Christmas ad was one of the most controversial, while McDonald's pulled its festive effort due to the backlash. This year, it seems we're seeing a strong counter movement, with big brands making a point of their commitment to handcrafted art.
First, there was the glorious Prada Christmas ad, directed by former Disney animator John Pomeroy. Now Levi's has pulled out the stops for a very different animated gem, showing that it's not just luxury brands that see the value of human craftsmanship in advertising.
Levi's Let’s Get Fuzzy stop-motion holiday campaign was produced by the London-based production studio Blinkink . The animation begins as a play on horror movies, making it a fun segue from Halloween. A monster interrupts a group of friends' cosy festive retreat in a snow-covered cabin. But Fuzzyeti's discovery of festive jumpers makes him quickly succumb to the holiday spirit.
The medium of painstaking stop-motion animation was chosen to highlight Levi's heritage of craftsmanship. As shown in the making of video below, a six-person team spent more than 2,000 hours over six and a half weeks building and painting the sets, including three cabins at different scales, along with 400 miniature trees, and four faces for each character.
The clothes are miniature replicas of real Levi's products – a stylist was on hand to ensure accuracy. They were moved for every frame of the animation to make them feel life like, but requiring four hours of work of every second of animation.
A reference edit was made with actors and the directors themselves acting out the roles (including a specialist monster actor for Fuzzyyeti). This was then used as the guide for the animators.
Levi's has form in animation, from the psychedelic 2D short The Stranger in 1971 to Clayman with Shaggy’s Boombastic in claymation in 1995. Today, the decision to use such a laborious handcrafted process makes a bigger statement, creating added distinction and value amid so much AI-generated content.
Your local food truck might not worry about their ugly AI flyers if they can do the job for cheap. But for big brands, proof of work like the behind-the-scenes video above has become as important as the finished advert. Avoiding the embarrassment of an 'AI content' label isn't enough, they're taking steps to proactively signal that an advert was human made.
Hermès and Ralph Lauren are just two fashion brands that have been doing this by mentioning the people behind their ads in the captions on social media. Naming the creative team behind a campaign has become a signal of craftsmanship, and the implication is clear: human-made art is seen as a sign of a premium brand.
Apple's also been on the trend with its embroidered logo and the stop-motion ad for Apple Games, which was also made by Blinklink. The resurgence of interest in stop motion is likely to continue to grow with Laika's Wildwood doing well at the box office.
