South Sea Sweethearts
Say aloha to a Technicolor cinema ad for Horlicks from the master of the Puppetoon, George Pal
Aloha! When the hero's sweetheart is kidnapped you know he's going to rescue her - but does it usually take six weeks sitting around drinking Horlicks first? The master of the 'Puppetoon' George Pal made five cinema ads for Horlicks in the late 1930s. Advertising agency J Walter Thompson were the British link with Pal's Dutch studio, with the scripts developed by JWT agency employee Alexander Mackendrick, the future Ealing and Hollywood director.
The Puppetoon animation technique relied on the production of a series of different puppets, heads, faces and limbs for each character in different stages of motion or expression. These could be swapped between filming, frame by frame. It brought the squash and stretch qualities of the cartoons to the physicality of puppets (hence the name Puppetoon). Pal successfully took his formula to the US in the 1940s, before moving into special effects features like War of the Worlds (1953).
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Animated Ads
In cinemas and on TV, animated adverts have frequently outshone the main attraction. In the early days of the cinema, animated ads were often relative epics, with five-minute comic encounters leading to a pack-shot punchline. The arrival of commercial television in 1955 brought the animated ad down to bite-size, but if anything they packed an even harder punch. Advertisers found that animation could soften the edges of a hard sell approach, and bring cartoon brand characters to life.
32 videos in this collection
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