’Tis the season of artificial intelligence-generated Christmas advertisements. Five specialists were said to be behind the offering from Coca-Cola — complete with computer-confected storks, sloths and polar bears infected with Christmas cheer — which was criticised as cheap-looking.
A clip by McDonald’s in the Netherlands and its slogan “the most terrible time of year” unnerved viewers with a cast including anthropomorphic biscuits burning on a tray and a belligerent Father Christmas stuck in traffic. It was removed after a backlash.
In France, however, a wolf who decides to become vegetarian has become the unlikely saviour of human-made cheer. A Christmas advert for a French supermarket chain has won tens of millions of views online and praise for artistry untainted by robots.
Intermarché has denied that the advert is trying to deter the French from eating meat
The two-minute cartoon, in which the lonely carnivore wins the friendship of forest animals by not eating them and learning to cook legumes instead, was commissioned by Intermarché to warm viewers’ hearts in an all-out American manner, but with French style.
Set to a nostalgic Seventies hit, Le Mal Aimé (“Unloved”) by Claude François, the advert took a year to make by a team of 80 people, led by the Montpellier-based animation company Illogic Studios and produced by the Wizz studio in Paris.
Within hours of its first broadcast, during the Miss France final on December 6, the advert, showing the wolf chopping carrots and mushrooms to lyrics lamenting being misunderstood, took off on streaming platforms, helped by English subtitles.
Admiring social media posts from around the world showed the animators had touched an international nerve. In France, a country fond of debate, the praise has been tempered with gripes from the right about “vegan propaganda dressed up in an animal story”, and charges of stigmatising meat. From the left, some are unhappy over the misappropriation of lupine identity and dietary dictation.
As the clip garnered millions of international views, the industry hailed the flair of the old-style cartoon. “While massive global brands like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s resort to AI for their Christmas ads, a French supermarket chain has just demonstrated the power and value of human-made animation,” Creative Bloq, an international art and design website, said. “Some people think even Disney and Pixar could learn a thing or two.”
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Thierry Cotillard, the chairman of Les Mousquetaires, Intermarché’s parent company, said the chain was delighted to have “gone against the trend of AI” and had shown that human intelligence can create “a different emotion than a robot”. He added: “We are very proud to be giving the Americans a lesson.”
Cotillard denied that Intermarché, whose fresh meat sections are doing a roaring seasonal trade, was promoting changes to viewers’ diets, although after the wolf sits down to Christmas lunch with the animals, the ad ends with the message: “We all have a reason to start eating better.”
He said it was about loneliness, self-improvement and acceptance. “It’s not about encouraging people to stop eating meat,” he said. “The idea is that no one should be excluded, not the wolf, who is not going to eat his new friends.”
The ad has revived interest in the music of Claude François, who died in 1978
ERLING MANDELMANN/GAMMA-RAPHO/GETTY IMAGES
Anne Guivarc’h, Intermarché’s brand director, said the company had never considered using AI when it decided to replace its previous Christmas ad, which had been running for eight years. “This year it was the right moment to go 100 per cent for emotion, given these difficult times. To offer a film like a cocoon, today more than ever,” she told Influencia, a trade website.
The video has brought Christmas cheer to the heirs of François, with his song soaring on streaming platforms. It has also spurred foreign interest in his cheesier end of the Seventies Chanson française genre.
The words of François, who died aged 39 in 1978 when he accidentally electrocuted himself in his bathroom, set the mood for the wolf’s loneliness. “I’m really afraid, all my life, of being misunderstood.”