Snapple Elements’ new campaign, out of Deutsch, New York, introduces viewers to four woodland creatures: Grumpy Gopher, Sinister Rabbit, Mr. Weasel and Happy Squirrel. The roughly animated quartet leaves its forested, utopian world for the big city. Each spot chronicles— day-in-the-life-style—the animals’ urban adventures.
The :30 "Rent Money" presents a perennial problem in city living: rent’s due, no cash. In this episode, Mr. Weasel has selfishly exchanged his friends’ security for some personal luxuries. The spot begins with a brief introduction reminiscent of old-school cop shows. The four animated characters appear in separate quadrants on the screen, as a deep-voiced announcer states, "Elements presents the heartfelt story of four woodland creatures who moved to the city and decided to share an apartment."
Open to Grumpy Gopher, Sinister Rabbit and Happy Squirrel sitting on a beat-up couch, watching TV and drinking Snapple Elements. The doorbell sounds, followed by persistent banging on the apartment door. Sinister Rabbit moves to investigate. Peering through the peephole, we see from Rabbit’s perspective the enormous belly of a man wearing a shirt sporting the words, "Sex Machine." A ring of keys dangles from his hands.
"It’s the landlord," Rabbit comments. "Did we pay the rent?" The overweight, world-weary Gopher volunteers that they’ve given the money to Weasel. "That’s right, Weasel paid it," Happy Squirrel chirps in. Enter the pimped-out Mr. Weasel wearing a long fur coat, cowboy hat and sunglasses. "Was that the door?" he asks with a mobster’s accent. "I’m havin’ a diamond brooch and a riding lawnmower delivered." His three pals look forlornly at their irresponsible friend, realizing their fate.
Next we see the troupe climbing out the window and down the building’s fire escape. "Squirrel, we may have to sell another one of your kidneys," Sinister Rabbit says. "You’re positive they grow back?" asks the innocent Squirrel. Sinister Rabbit assures him that kidneys grow back "like hair." Cut to a semi-animated shot of three Snapple Elements bottles surrounded by a swirling banner with a tag that reads, "Natural Energy for an Unnatural World."
"Rent Money," along with three other spots—"Cruising," "Gopher-It" and "Extreme Sports"—represents the first television effort for Elements, a natural energy drink produced by Snapple. Previously, Deutsch had done some outdoor, print and point-of-purchase advertising for Elements, but decided to pool this year’s budget into one strategic media buy: MTV. With a target audience of 18- to 24-year-olds and a network like MTV, the agency could push the campaign in ways that would speak directly to its savvy demographic. Not only does animation with an adult sensibility carry widespread appeal with this generation of viewers, it’s also a unique advertising approach to take in the energy drink category.
"We were trying to avoid what some beverage titans do, which is to portray young people doing these outlandish, extreme activities," explained Deutsch senior copywriter Mark Koelfgen. Deutsch senior VP/group creative director Cheryl Van Ooyen added,"Energy drinks offer this over-promise that if you drink this, it will give you energy, and you realize that the people who are drinking this stuff aren’t out hang-gliding—they’re sitting around watching TV."
With that in mind, the creative team of Van Ooyen, Koelfgen and senior art director Tuesday Poliak came up with characters that were "basically four eighteen-year-old boys covered in fur," as Van Ooyen saw it. "The campaign is about energy for everyday life," said Poliak. "In the case of ‘Rent Money,’ they need energy to run away from the landlord," Van Ooyen continued.
The woodland creatures were all given distinct, polar-opposite personalities. Grumpy Gopher acts like an old man, even though he’s supposed to be about 18. He also suffers from a condition known as gynecomastia—the excessive development of mammary glands in males—which means Gopher has little boobies. Sinister Rabbit, as his name suggests, is the evil ringmaster. Mr. Weasel is the kind of character whose friends are bookies and prostitutes. And Happy Squirrel is the slightly effeminate, optimistic one in the group. Collectively, they recognize no difference between themselves and human beings. For instance, when they spot a sexy (human) babe on the street in "Cruising," Mr. Weasel has no doubt that he can get her. Their level of self-awareness is all but lost, and they feel very much at home in their new urban setting.
With each personality worked out, Koelfgen sketched out drawings of the characters and began shopping around for an animation company that could bring them all to life. The specifications were that the style of animation was to remain raw, and the characters, for the most part, were not to be altered. London-based Passion Pictures, which bid on the project, decided to make changes to the sketches anyway. "Passion Pictures was the first company to say, ‘We love it, but we’re going to change a few things,’ " recalled Koelfgen. "What Passion did," added Van Ooyen, "was give the characters a sense of movement. Mark and Tuesday would explain how a character felt, and Passion would make it happen. It was that extra big step we wanted in a partner, since the characters were so strong going in."
From Passion Pictures’ point of view, the Elements campaign was one of those jobs it couldn’t walk away from. "We almost turned this job down because we were really busy," said Passion Pictures producer Hugo Sands. "The reason we did [the spots] was because the designs and the scripts were so distinctive from some of the day-to-day jobs we do that we felt we couldn’t turn them down," he recalled.
Passion’s director Russell Brooke led the animation process. At any given time, upwards of 20 people were working on the spots due to an extremely tight schedule. For "Rent Money," Brooke was the sole animator, but could not be reached for comment at press time.
The characters were first drawn with pencil on paper, and later traced with black pen in a rather imprecise fashion to give the animation a raw look. All of the woodland creatures were penned on a white background, causing them to appear like rough paper cutouts. Likewise, their gliding movements suggest that these torn-out pieces of paper are moving against a still, painted environment. An almost imperceptible gray shadow was cast under each character’s white background to help create this illusion.
Subtle accents of color were added to the animals’ ears or eyes in muted tones. In fact, the entire color palette was extremely limited, in order to maintain the low-tech look the agency envisioned. By contrast, the Elements bottles that appear in the spot were photo-real (rather than animated) images of the bottles, which stand out because of their bright colors.
Once all of the storyboards were completed and approved, everything was scanned into the computer using Toonz, an animation program. Both Toonz and After Effects were deployed to composite all the animation elements together.
"It wasn’t a huge technical challenge. It was more of a creative challenge, in that ‘Rent Money’ is quite a sophisticated script and the animation style is quite simple looking—so the creative challenge was getting the required amount of acting to make the sophistication of the script work and to make it funny, and yet be true to the pared-down style," related Sands.
The spot begins and ends with some interesting sounds, created by New York-based tonefarmer composer/sound designer Raymond Loewy. (Tonefarmer is a new company due to open its doors later this summer.) The introduction, as Loewy described it, "is a combination of electric guitar and a hammering piece of metal, which gives it this sort of adventurous feel." The end tag is accompanied by a tribal chanting/yodeling composition. Loewy and freelance composer/sound designer Krishna Venkatesh also worked on all of the sound effects for the spot, which was later mixed at Howard Schwartz Recording, New York, by engineer Steve Rosen.
