Commercial Critique #5 – Balloons

MTV Brazil - Balloons

This commercial is just good plain fun. I’m a big fan of stop-motion animation, and while this isn’t quite the same technique, it’s similar. Can you imagine how much time it took to create and orchestrate the drawings on each of those balloons? I mean, there have to be hundreds of them. And each image flows perfectly into the next. This is my fascination with stop-motion; I just can’t wrap my head around making so many little pieces fit together so well.

The music here is fun too, but kind of annoying at the same time, which I’d say is a pretty good summary of MTV as a whole. The whole idea for this ad smacks of youthfulness – the song is a classic remade into something slightly aggravating, the balloons are an obvious nod to childhood, and even the drawings are unsophisticated and childlike. These juvenile elements are precisely what make the ad so simple and fun. It’s the sort of thing a kid would come up with – a flip book made on balloons you have to pop. The shot where they show the popping mechanism is a smart idea, too, because up until that point you’re not entirely sure what’s happening to the balloons, and everything just seems kind of messy.

The drawings do a good job of illustrating “The Music Never Stops,” as well. Each musician gives way or gives birth to some new musician, and the balloons just keep popping, and it seems like the story will progress until infinity. It’s pretty impressive to communicate the idea of infinity using just four different camera angles. Also, can you imagine how easy it would have been for this whole project to go wrong? If the machine screwed up at all there would have been so much work lost. I suppose that’s the price you pay when filming something as simple as this – it’s only simple if you don’t mess it up. This ad makes me smile and it gets its message across without any frills.