The Secret of Kells is a fantastic film and easily one of the best made in recent times. It’s highly original, dripping with beautiful animation and stands up to countless rewatching. On the surface, it appears to be the perfect animate feature, so why has it been so hard for it to find the same kind of commercial success that say, Frozen can (outside of the obvious reason of throwing hundreds of millions at it)? I call it the Kells Conundrum and it’s a concept we’re going to discuss today.
Too often it seems that when cartoon characters make the leap into animated commercials, the quality isn’t quite up to par with the original material. Thankfully, sometimes one gets out that really shines and this Weetabix ad from 1992 is no exception.
Emulating the classic Looney Tunes shorts of the late 40s and early 50s, it condenses an entire plot from the usual 7-8 minutes down into under 45 seconds. It’s all accomplished, quite amazingly without much loss to either the characters or the plot (although naturally Weetabix plays a starring role) and it manages to maintain the high level of screwball comedy that the shorts were famous for. Enjoy!
To use the tired old quote, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. However the line where it turns from imitation to blatant plagiarism is a blurry one that is often whipped out when two pieces of content appear to be eerily similar.
Witness the latest in the pantheon of “he copied me” accusations. British bank Lloyds TSB ran an ad last year that began the build-up to the Olympic games. It looks like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc9yKO-OCAc
Meanwhile, the BBC has launched the trailer for their coverage of the games, which has some crying foul. Here it is for comparison:
Never mind the fact that both films were created by the same ad agency, does the BBC one rip-off the Lloyds one?
Hardly. There is a similarity to be sure in terms of the look and feel of the spots, but that is only part of the story. Both spots have very different storylines and both have very different messages; the former selling a bank’s social connections, the latter selling an explicit product.
The likely truth is that someone at the BBC like the Lloyds ads and requested the ad agency, Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe Y&R to create something similar.
Both videos should further illustrate that similarity does not necessarily mean stolen content.
Naughty animated commercials are nothing new, but they were supposed to be all in the past, right? No place for such smuttiness in the enlightened age…or so you thought!
Unabashed sex or just some animators stretching their arms? Either way, this animated commercial for British insurance website Confused.com manages to fit more bouncing boobs and a not-so-discreet wink than any that have gone before.
