For once, there seems to be almost unanimous opinion about the year's best Christmas advert. While global giants like Coca-Cola and McDonald's gave themselves to the darkside and got panned for nightmarish AI generations, a French supermarket chain unexpectedly became an international household name by using handcrafted traditional animation.
The Intermarché Christmas advert has racked up over 2.6 million views on YouTube, over 3 million on TikTok and over 200K likes on Instagram. Some of the thousands of people commenting on the posts say it's the first time they've chosen to search for an advert and watch it voluntarily.
Of course, the commercial isn't a success merely because it doesn't use AI. It has a heart-tugging festive story about a wolf who stops eating his neighbours, adorable character design, and the animation is beautifully executed in a 3D style that looks organic and painterly, enhancing the storybook feel.
Everyone involved has expressed surprise at how 'wolf mania' has gripped France and the wider world. Intermarché is rushing to produce wolf toys but has warned that they won't be ready for Christmas.
In the meantime, we can enjoy the behind-the-scenes videos from French animation company Illogic Studios showing some of the work that went into making the animation (see our guides to the best animation software and the best laptops for animation if you're inspired).
Montpellier-based Illogic Studios worked on The Unloved (Le mal aimé) with the advertising agency Romance and Wizz studio in Paris. They say the animation took around a year to make with 80 people working on it.
For the character design, they brought in the German children’s book illustrator Wiebke Rauers who specialises in drawing animals with lots of personality. You can see some of her drawings for the project in the Instagram post below, and parts of the storyboarding, animation, effects and paint over in the post above.
Illogic says it chose Wiebke for her creative and lively art style. Despite deciding to use 3D animation, the studio knew from the start that it didn't want a realistic look. Instead, it aimed to “preserve the brushstroke feel and spontaneous energy” of Wiebke's drawings when translating them into 3D.
To do that, almost every detail was sculpted and animated by hand and a painterly effect was laid over the animation to create a raw, naïve look.
The video below shows the sculpting of some of the characters and props in the festive advert.
The studio has also posted a video showing how it crafted and animated the food in the Intermarché advert.
As well as the strong story and the beautiful animation and editing, part of the reason for the ad's success is undoubtedly that it chimed with the popular mood at a time when people are tiring of AI slop.
Some of the more than 6,000 comments on the video on YouTube note the contrast with the AI-generated adverts launched by Coca-Cola and McDonald's.
Victor Chevalier, Romance’s senior copywriter, has said he agrees with that appraisal: “AI cannot create stories. We create stories.” He told Associated Press, adding: “What makes the success of our commercial is that we took time.”
Thierry Cotillard, the chairman of Les Mousquetaires, Intermarché’s parent company, also agreed. He said the chain's ad had demonstrated that human intelligence can create “a different emotion than a robot”.
It seems the public agrees. It's not often that a two-minute advert for a supermarket gets compared to Disney and Pixar and inspires fan art and calls for a feature-length movie. Perhaps Time magazine should have put the unloved wolf on its Person of the Year cover instead of the 'architects of AI.
