Six Ways Animation Makes Nice Ideas Mighty Nice

“According to Adweek, despite the potential of using animation and some amazing local animated campaigns launching recently for big brands like Telstra, only 6% of adverts globally use the format,” Matt Taylor tells LBB.

Animation is one of the most enjoyable art forms. It transcends limitations and allows for complicated ideas to be explored at a level understandable for everyone. Regardless of subject, style, or tone, animation will always evoke a child-like sense of wonder. 

It’s a medium that has recently been used by leading brands and unexpected clients, such as Telstra and Queensland Palliative Care.

The team at Bear Meets Eagle on Fire and +61 used animation to imbue Telstra with a feeling of warmth and imagination. And Cocogun tackled the harrowing topic of death without shying away from the bad bits, while also celebrating the good. 

Matt Taylor, head of business development and original content at Mighty Nice (Nexus Studios), caught up with LBB’s Casey Martin to discuss the unlimited power of animation, what it means for a brand, and how best to harness its strengths. 

“We’ve been visiting Australian agencies and meeting creatives looking for new ways into their creative challenges, we’ve been talking to them about the ways animation can make your next nice idea mighty,” he said.

Here are Matt’s six picks, and what animation delivered for each.

In animation, every frame is a blank canvas where characters, props and locations can all be meticulously crafted to suit the desired design style. 

A beautiful example of this is the launch video for the launch of reMarkable. The product is so beautifully simple but the idea behind it the campaign was so big - that this is a short film to start a revolution. A protest against distraction. 

We worked closely with Director Simon Robson to design sequences, transitions and metaphors that created iconic moments, morphing from the everyday to the abstract and searing themselves into viewers' memories.

Last year, we created three short spots for Gamble Aware, each of which needed to convey the emotional state of the courageous individuals who volunteered their stories for the project. 

Gambling-related imagery can be a sensitive topic for the primary audience of this campaign, so our directors dug deep to find the primary emotional core of each story, leaning on metaphors to create abstracted, animated vignettes. 

This left viewers to interpret the stories themselves, offering space for a more personal moment of connection for those that needed it most.

Animation allows us to invent new worlds that live alongside, but also free from the burdens of, our everyday life. Worlds that aren’t so entangled in what life “is,” but instead easily embrace what we wish it could be. 

Working with Nexus Studios, we have just finished working with Channel 4 to create a psychedelic, retro animated journey through classic cakes and rainbows for the Great British Bake Off. It’s always an exciting journey when a client turns the fantasy dial up to 11!

The “She Creates Change” series brings rarely heard, real life stories of courage from remote communities to the screen. Through animation, not only could we share these incredible stories but Nexus Studios and Mighty Nice directors worked with local artists to weave each girl’s culture into each film’s design showing their challenges in an emotionally sensitive and visually appealing way for young adults. 

By bringing to life the colours, styles and textures of their communities we could create films that are specific to their cultures but still speak to the greater human experience so that these local stories can become global. 

A few years ago, Leo Burnett Melbourne came to us with a fast turnaround job and an idea - create funny, ownable characters and a world for an Australian insurer looking to be different. 

Fast forward to today and the HBF quokkas are an immediately recognised, well-loved commodity among Australian audiences. When it comes to world-building, revisiting a location from a previous animated campaign is as simple as opening up a file. Environments, characters and props can be altered and expanded upon however the new script may require it to. 

And as a bonus, no one gets older, fatter or balder - unless the script says so. Now in their fifth year (and counting), HBF’s animated world includes everything from 80s music ‘quok’ ballads to quokkas with crystal balls - and it just keeps getting better!

Humour is all about timing. Manipulating time and erring toward the more surreal laws of physics allows animation to create hilarious scenarios. We know that finding the next big creative idea is a serious business, but in the midst of all this intellectual strain it never hurts to leave room for a few laughs. 

A great recent example of this is another recent collaboration with Nexus Studios, where the Austrian Government asked us to animate a no-holds barred wrestling match between an Austrian housewife and her fossil-fuel powered boiler. The script was hilarious and WE WERE IN - this needs to happen more.