To coincide with the 30th anniversary of its popular kids’ card game Uno, Mattel has rolled out a new animated spot that evokes visual and musical styles that, well, look and sound as if they might have been around at the time the game was being developed.
The retro style of "Everybody Uno," created by Celluloid Studios, now in Portland, Ore., out of FCB Chicago, isn’t passé, though. It’s as hip today as South Park or SpongeBob SquarePants. Celluloid was purchased by Vinton Studios, Portland, Ore., in April; the company relocated to Vinton’s space, but maintains its own identity and staff.
Celluloid creative director James Wahlberg relates that the Uno job came in this past March with the retro look already in place, thanks to designer Kirsten Ulve, who had been brought in by FCB. (Mattel recently put its boys’ and entertainment accounts in review, and FCB Chicago and Los Angeles have opted out of that review.)
"She had a style that I fell in love with instantly," Wahlberg says. "It’s a minimalist, retro-hip, simple line style with a very contemporary palette. She did a storyboard based on her own design and that was the first storyboard that I saw. By the time I got onto the project we had a look already. I felt my job became, basically, not to screw [that look] up."
Like the Uno game itself, which is based on colors and numbers, the spot is designed for international use. The object of Uno is to score 500 points by being the first player to run out of cards. The goal with "Everybody Uno" was to create a spot that would play across a number of cultures and nationalities, showing a family involved in the fun, as well as the tension, of the game.
The style wasn’t a stretch at Celluloid. "I’ve always been drawn to that kind of stuff," Wahlberg explains, "a combination of complex characterizations and a primitive style. This is much more sophisticated than South Park, but it’s the same idea. It’s not over-animated. In fact, it kind of tips its hat to some of the more limited flash animation you find on the Internet."
The resulting spot is a Technicolor, animated wonder that shows a family, circa the late 1960s, enjoying the card game with shots of the Uno game pieces flying through the air. The ad’s soundtrack, composed by Gary Guzman of Spank! Music and Sound Design, Chicago and Santa Monica, is a catchy tune, which explains the rules of the game.
Unlike some jobs that come in as vague ideas that agency creatives look to Wahlberg to flesh out, "Everybody Uno" was fully storyboarded with the retro design in place. "We were asked to present other design ideas," relates Wahlberg, "which we were happy to do, but we all liked Kirsten Ulve’s work, and felt it was strong. The agency did a fantastic job of homing in on what they were looking for. It was a great combination of design and soundtrack that they brought to the party. It was one of those situations where they made all the right calls, including getting me to work on it."
Wahlberg was being a little tongue-in-cheek with the last remark, but the job was truly up his alley. "I’ve done a lot of primitive-style animation, and also primitive live-action in much the same way," he notes. (Wahlberg helms live-action work via his own shop, Visitor, Los Angeles, which until Vinton’s acquisition of Celluloid was the latter shop’s sister company.) "Bending the rules a little bit in animation is something I’ve kind of made part of my career. I’ve done a number of spots with simplistic use of animation or live action, but with complex characterizations. I did a thing for Squirt, the soft drink, in a really similar kind of animation, but I used live-action heads and animated environments and bodies. I tend to mix it up." Wahlberg was creative director on "Squirt" and "Squirt Neighborhood," and directed the live action through Visitor; Eric Wiese of Celluloid was the animation director, and both spots were done via FCB.
While the "Everybody Uno" spot was essentially an execution of a storyboard, that didn’t mean Wahlberg and the Celluloid Studios crew—executive producer Jan Johnson, producer Katie Rauh, lead animator Weise, and After Effects artist Brian Cox—didn’t have any input. "We took the story and ran with it," recounts Wahlberg. "We crafted the thing. What I try to do with animation, especially when it has a very specific design, is to custom-tailor the choreography and the story to the design, the same way you would mold a role to a particularly strong actor."
Sounds Of The Game
FCB art director Joan Picchietti and her team brought in the soundtrack, which Wahlberg also embraced. "It was pretty strong," he says. "We used that soundtrack as the basis to drive the animation, because it is a cohesive element—it’s what holds the family together. Using that soundtrack, we—Joan and the people on my team—crafted a story involving the aggressive side of playing the game with your family, the triumphant side, the frustrating side; and we gave each family member, including the cat, a very specific role. We were trying to get across all these bigger emotions—anger with steam coming out of the ears, triumph, and we ended it with a conga line dance with the whole family, including the cat."
The whole job took about eight weeks to complete, and the Celluloid team utilized After Effects and Toon Boom, a digital ink and paint system.
"One of the fun things about cel animation right now is that it’s hip once again," Wahlberg points out. "It’s traded over the Internet, back and forth. … [‘Everybody Uno’] is a much more sophisticated palette [than cel animation from the past]. It’s a sophisticated design in that it brings to mind design and color schemes of the ’60s, but in a really contemporary format."
