By Malay Desai
From: BETC Lux, Paris
The apparel and merchandise giant’s in-store film celebrates its 80th anniversary through stop motion and animation. It traces the journey of its flagship product – the branded Polo t-shirt from its original style in 1933 to the 40s, 50s.. right up to the 2000s. Most decades are marked by a popular culture phenomenon, which is formed by animated t-shirts of various colours. Each decade is also given a tag such as ‘sporty’ and ‘playful’ with a pop soundtrack. ’80 years of creativity, colours and elegance’, the copy at the end says.
By now, you might have figured that while we may doff a hat to some spectacularly produced commercials of snazzy products, we’re bigger suckers of simply put together ones of routine, mass-appeal stuff. Lacoste, that green crocodile that has completed 80 years of fabulous existence this 2013, falls into the latter category and its animated effort is simple even by Indian standards.
Now we don’t want to paint a Wiki profile of the company but in short, it’s relevant to note that here’s a company that specialized in tennis and golf apparels while starting off and has grown into a global retailer producing shoes and perfumes too. [Lacoste also claims it was the first to have brand names outside the clothing.] So when this high-recall, widely accepted brand turns over a milestone, it does quite the right thing by making a film about all the adjectives it’s been known for… and not some snooty self-indulgent lecture about impacting lives.
The key fun factor here is how the creators of this one-minute film have connected each decade with a thought or emotion, and have used flying/dancing t-shirts to convey it. It doesn’t really give an educative story on how the tees changed or evolved – in fact they look the same through all the dates, but their presence, and comfort being there while certain revolutions were taking over the world is the underlying thought. There are references to Superman, the Rubik’s Cube, the hippie culture, air hockey game (Pac-Man might have had legal issues to be referred to!), computers and the ‘like’ button which is tagged to 2010.
True credit though belongs only to the animators here (they shot 250 t-shirts over 3 days before the work began) for bringing a mundane piece of clothing to life. The croc’s always there, and it will only seem more iconic after you watch this spot once. Indian brands, here’s another case to use the teeming talents from the underemployed animation industry. Our only grouse – this film was apparently screened just inside Lacoste stores. With its awesomeness, it can win over loads more people outside. Free the croc!
(To watch this film, visit Vimeo.com/62433464 or to watch it on your smart-phone, scan this code:)
