The Bear and the Hare

In the spirit of the holiday season comes an animated short film from one of the United Kingdom’s best loved retailers, John Lewis. For the past several years, John Lewis has been gaining worldwide attention for its annual heart-melting holiday mini movies that usher in the holiday season.

This year, London based communication company adam&eveDDB looked to the animal kingdom to produce a tale of an unlikely woodland friendship, The Bear and the Hare. The premise of the films each year is generally always the same, which is to convey the idea of “thoughtful giving”. However, the key challenge comes in to play when trying to surpass the previous year’s campaign, Creative Directors Aidan McClure and Laurent Simon explain.

“The starting point was considering what would be the perfect gift and that nothing beats the gift of Christmas,” says Simon. “The idea was to show this through a story with woodland animals. But honing the storyline, hitting the right tone and agreeing the landscape and geography of the setting, its characters, time frame and precisely what should wake the bear was almost the greatest challenge,” adds McClure.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at what is going to be a major challenge to top next year…

In a technological world where animation has primarily evolved to 3D, I find it quite enlightening to go back to the grass roots of animation, as this film utilizes both traditional 2D animation mixed with stop motion animation. For those unfamiliar with the animation process, animation whether 2D or 3D, runs at a frame rate of 30fps (frames per second). So from a 2D animation standpoint, the extremely time consuming and tedious process involves hand drawing 30 images for every one second of animation, or 1,800 images per minute. Let’s take a first-hand look at some of the behind the scenes of this production with Directors Elliot Dear and Yves Geleyn…

From all of us here at Celi Creative, our warmest wishes go out to all for a joyous holiday season and a New Year filled with peace and happiness. May we all follow in the footsteps of The Bare and the Hare this holiday season with kindheartedness, generosity, and “thoughtful giving”.