The Anime Spy With A Flaky Hiccup.
How do you create a campaign that centres around male dandruff to an audience that is often too embarrassed to talk about the subject? Well, Forsman & Bodenfors Singapore had a few ideas and together with Wizz’s CRCR created The Chase, a stunning story set across the world following Ando the spy for Head & Shoulders in Japan.
The 2.5D animation style used to create the film gives it an extra layer of humour and realism that is so typical of CRCR. However, and perhaps most importantly, it’s ignited a conversation that is often considered a taboo by men suffering dandruff.
“The film celebrates the Japanese art of anime and is such a creative triumph that the creative team say they’ve heard fans asking for the character to be given his own Netflix series.”
The plot isn’t something new or refreshing as similar to “ Catch Me If You Can” where a detective is pursuing the main character. But what made me really like this piece of work was they way they talked about dandruff being more common than you think, The fact that Ando, a really sauve looking guy who also suffers from dandruff helps audience feel that they shouldn’t be soo ashamed of this issue.
“And through the story, we crafted every scene to dramatise the annoying consequence of dandruff, and how Ando eventually finds the perfect solution to break free. We preferred to focus on the positive outcome - that no matter how bad the situation was, there is a solution in Head & Shoulders”
In addition to this, i think the icing on the cake for this work is the use of an anime styled art direction. It clearly breaks the clutter from your typical overly photoshopped hair whipping, scalp close ups commercials. And with hints of inspiration from popular anime scenes like Mission Impossible, 007, Archer, Spider-Verse, and even One Punch Man this ad is bound to hint the right spots with the ever increasing audience who watch anime.
Lastly even tho this is just a 1 min commercial, The way that the team brings Ando to life really shows that they know the importance of building a character with real personality. On that note, finding the right partner was also crucial, and this was shown clear on how CRCR’s approach to 2.5D animation has helped build the Ando universe into such a unique and stunning one.
Once the main character becomes interesting or like-able, the interest and demand from the public to know about backstories or story continuations opens up many more spaces for this campaign to grow and give Head & Shoulders ownership of these areas of interest to talk about their products.
I really like this piece of work and I really hope that one day i’ll get an opportunity to work on a project like this.
Agency : Forsman & Bodenfors Singapore
Information source : LittleBlackBook