United Airlines Debuts Five New Animation TV Spots

The rare experience of witnessing many of the world's greatest athletes perform remarkable feats of flexibility and quest for the podium following years of training certainly helps define the Olympic Games of the summer season; however, the preparation for these games by advertising agencies and the production companies they work with, to provide millions (or in the 2008 Games' case, billions) of viewers with innovative commercials, remains just as remarkable a feat. Rising to meet this challenge is domestic and international airline company United Airlines and ad agency Barrie D'Rozario Murphy.

Integrating high-quality, groundbreaking animation techniques into commercial is certainly nothing new. But when packaged together to promote the industry's increased fascination with a style or technique in tandem with the latest slate of international goods and/or services a client may offer, animation can do wonders. For the 2008 Summer Games, United Airlines has called forth five remarkable new commercials, each using some marvelous variant of the animated medium as its baseline in a series of narratives that extol the value of a comfortable plane flight.

from "Heart"

The 60-second and 30-second TV spots are scheduled to air on NBC (if not already) nationally as well as locally in Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

The five television spots each highlight a particular emotional or psychological connection that passengers have with United Airlines; expressing in paper cut-out animation, stop motion animation, computer animation or otherwise, the exclusive familiarity passengers have with the airline organization.

"Heart" is a sixty-second commercial that emphasizes the emotional bridge that air travel can serve as, profiling a husband and wife separated by any number of miles for a period of time (view "Heart"). Easily the most genuine and impactful of United Airlines' new set of commercials; here, paper puppetry and stop-motion animation articulate a woman's tender affection for her husband, quite literally handing him a silhouette of her heart as she travels abroad for an architecture presentation in Europe. Directed by Jamie Caliri, who also served as the director for the award-winning TV spot "Dragon" (2006), returns to guide "Heart." The musical score for "Heart" is a beautiful piano duet of "Rhapsody in Blue" performed by Herbie Hancock and Lang Lang.

"Butterfly" uses a slightly warmer and more colorful alternative to traditional animation (view "Butterfly"). Animated with colored salt as manipulated with condor bird feathers as shot with a carefully positioned black canvas, "Butterfly" is a visual splendor. Promoting the airline's 180-degree flat-bed business class seating arrangement, the commercial is outlined by a violin version of Gerswhin's "Rhapsody in Blue." Directed by polish animator Aleksandra Korejwo, the thirty-second TV spot "Butterfly" is a confident exercise in the beauteous power of alternative animation.


from "Butterfly"