Didn't I say that the next one of these I would do would be a Christmas one? Huh? Didn't I?
One of the numerous great things about the holiday season are the commercials that air during it. Nowadays, you don't see as many animated Christmas commercials - mainly because you don't see as many animated commercials as a whole. I can't remember seeing one new animated Christmas commercial on TV this year. It's very weird.
Actually, most of the Christmas ads this year have been a letdown. Most of them are just needlessly depressing with nothing whimsical or Christmassy about them at all. Half the time when I'm watching TV I just see ads for pharmaceuticals. Because nothing says "Happy Holidays" like pharmaceuticals, am I right?
But I'm not here to complain. I'm here to share with you some great animated Christmas ads from over the years. My one rule for this post is that they have to be FULLY-ANIMATED, or at least MOSTLY-animated. Which, alas, means that I can't include the M&Ms Christmas ad, which is my personal favorite (I figured if I qualified THAT as animation, by that logic I'd have to qualify those POM "Worry Monster" ads as animated because the monsters in them are CGI. Where is the line drawn?).
I had to start with this one. This, along with the aforementioned M&Ms ad, is one of those ads that's been airing around the holiday season for years. It made its debut in 1989, and yet not a holiday season has gone by without it airing at least once. Not only that, but it's also one of the few commercials to have its own Wikipedia page.
This is a simple ad, and some of the best things in life are the simple ones. It was directed by Carl Willat at the animation studio Colossal Pictures. There are actually two versions of this ad - the original stop-motion one, and a 2012 updated version with CGI (that's the version we've seen on TV since then). I think it's scientifically impossible for someone to watch this ad without a smile on their face.
Unless it's the 2020 version of the ad where the kisses are interrupted by live action people. Don't think I wasn't just as upset with that as everyone else was. I still get really annoyed when they air THAT one on TV.
Ah, the Coca-Cola polar bears! How come you don't see them in ads anymore?
Anyway, this ad is one of many featuring the bears produced by Rhythm & Hues. A good chunk of them are Christmas ads - which makes sense, since we tend to associate arctic animals like polar bears with the holidays, what with them being in winter. It was difficult to choose which one to do... there's also one where the polar bears meet penguins, and one where the polar bears watch fireworks. You can find them on YouTube.
The bears were the idea of a Mr. Ken Stewart. First he thought of how people drink Coca-Cola at the movies, then he thought about how much his Labrador retriever looked like a polar bear. Putting those two thoughts together, he came up with the very first Coca-Cola polar bears ad, where the bears drink Coca-Cola while watching the Northern Lights.
Hope these bears make a comeback someday. At least let 'em appear in a Super Bowl commercial for old times' sake.
This 1999 Comcast commercial was directed by Bob Kurtz at Kurtz & Friends, an animation studio that I talked about before in my very first post about animated commercials. This studio has such a great art style that adds a natural charm to anything they produce, and I love how the ad goes from calm and serene to ROCK MUSIC just so suddenly. And this is coming from somebody who knows nothing about satellite dishes or how they work. And the reveal that the ad takes place on the front of a Christmas card is a nice touch.
It's been five years, and it still feels so weird to me that Snoopy isn't the mascot of MetLife anymore. I still associate the company with the character and it's hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that he and the rest of the Peanuts gang aren't appearing in their ads. Maybe a good chunk of it stems from the fact that I don't think I've seen a single MetLife ad on TV since then (was MetLife's mindset "If we don't have a beloved cartoon character as our mascot, why bother making commercials?").
The Peanuts gang is another one of those things a lot of us associate with the holiday season (mainly due to their multiple Christmas specials), so it was only natural that MetLife would have them appear in their Christmas ad. It's here we learn that Charlie Brown and his friends aren't very good at charades.
Y'know, I never thought of Godzilla and King Kong as being the type of characters to star in a Christmas commercial, but clearly someone at Best Buy did, and I am incredibly grateful that they did. This is one of those Christmas ads that focuses more on humor than sentimentality. We don't get a lot of Christmas ads like that nowadays. Maybe because the world is a far less humorous place than it was in the 1990s.
It's not uncommon to see characters from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in commercials. They've appeared in ads for Aflac, Nissan, Denny's, CBS, Window's phones, Bing, AT&T, and - as seen here - Verizon. I'll admit that this ad does feel very spiteful. Directly mocking your competitors in your ads always does. Maybe Genesis really did what Nintendon't, but still...
Speaking of phone companies making fun of each other around the holidays, here's one of MANY ads that Alltel did in which their spokesperson, Chad, teams up with Santa Claus to stop the eeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil plans of Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile employees to ruin Christmas. They did at least FOUR ads about this. FOUR. In fact, these characters (minus Santa) also appeared in live action ads! I don't know whether to roll my eyes at how petty this seems or laugh at it. I mean, there's a reason why Kellogg's doesn't do cereal commercials where the Trix Rabbit, Sonny the Cocoa Puffs Bird, and the Honey Nut Cheerios Bee attempt to blow up the Earth only to get beaten up by Tony the Tiger and Toucan Sam.
Okay, back to the feel-good ads. I would make a "how do they celebrate Christmas in prehistoric times" joke, but a million others have done that already. So instead, let's talk about how nice it is to see Fred and Barney actually share the cereal for once. Usually, Fruity Pebbles ads go like this: Barney disguises himself and tries to trick Fred out of his cereal instead of just buying his own box of it. Fred is fooled, but then discovers it's Barney and chases after him. Barney's apparently supposed to be the one we root for. This time? Santa gently urges them to share, and instead of cheering Fred on as he pursues Barney we feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Interestingly, this ad first came out in the 1980s, but in the 1990s they redubbed it with Frank Welker as Barney and Jim Cummings as Santa. I've included both versions here.
This Kellogg's ad from the 1980s is another one that gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. I always like seeing advertising mascots gather together to have fun (showing us that, y'know, they do have lives outside of hocking their cereal or dealing with kids that want to steal it). The warm color scheme, the peaceful music, and Thurl Ravenscroft's gentle performance as Tony combine to make another ad that you can't watch without smiling. In a perfect world, this would be one of those ads that they air once every holiday season. Problem is, most of these characters haven't appeared in a commercial in decades (because cereal commercials aren't allowed to be fun anymore as a result of people blaming them for their kids becoming fat).
This is a more recent Christmas ad (from around 2018, I think?). Stop-motion and Christmas go together like hot chocolate and marshmallows, so it's only natural that so many Christmas commercials are done in stop-motion. This one features LeBron James, hawking Sprite Cranberry... a drink that I have never tasted. Considering I like Sprite and I also like cranberry juice, I should really try it at some point.
Look at this beautiful hand-drawn animation. This ad, for the British department store John Lewis, features animation by Disney animators Dominic Carola and Aaron Blaise - the latter of whom co-directed Brother Bear, which explains why the ad feels so much like that movie. More than anything, this commercial really makes me wish that Disney would do a hand-drawn animated film again. It helps that the ad tells a very touching, makes you all warm and fuzzy inside story... am I starting to repeat myself?
Side note, I can't hear the song "Somewhere Only We Know" without thinking of the 2011 Winnie the Pooh movie. I remember the trailer for that featured the song.
Okay, I recognize this art style. It took me a second to figure out WHERE, but then it occurred to me - I'd seen characters that looked just like the ones in this ad in issues of Disney Adventures magazine! Is this the same artist? And if so, what is their name?! Could somebody please help me out with this?
Anyhow, Applebee's rarely does animated commercials. This was one of their rare ventures into the world of moving drawings. It encourages you to get somebody an Applebee's gift card for Christmas. Just hope that they don't prefer TGI Friday's.
Speaking of Applebee's, I gotta ask... do they still have all the pennants and posters and stuff hanging on the walls in 'em? What about the carousel horses in between the booths? I haven't been to an Applebee's in years, I legitimately have no idea...
This ad is for Walt Disney World's annual "Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party"... which I don't think I've ever been to. The animation here is by Eric Goldberg, who's one of my favorite animators. So there's no way I wasn't going to include it in this post.
Here's another one by Kurtz & Friends, this one for Milton Bradley games and ALSO featuring Santa Claus and his reindeer. I love the design of the reindeer here (they sort of remind me of Pony from It's Pony, if anyone is familiar with that show). Like I said before, this studio's art style just has a natural charm to it. And no matter what decade you were born in, this ad is bound to make you nostalgic - because who HASN'T played at least ONE of these games at some point?
One company that's really gotten better at their Christmas ads nowadays is Honda... or at least HAD gotten better at their Christmas ads. This year they just did a dull live action ad. But for a few years before 2022, they used stop-motion in their holiday commercials because, as we've established, stop-motion and Christmas go together like hot chocolate and marshmallows (which likely stems from the fact that so many animated Christmas specials are done in stop-motion). I've always liked their ads with iconic toys like Strawberry Shortcake, Gumby, GI Joe, and the Care Bears shilling for cars, but those are live action with stop-motion characters so I couldn't include them in this post. But they've also done plenty of entirely stop-motion ads like this one that I could put on the list. Thus...
Oh, goody, another cereal ad! In the 1990s, Cookie Crisp's mascots were Irish-accented cop Officer Crumb, the cereal-stealing Cookie Crook, and his dog Chip. Their shtick was that Cookie Crook, like many other cereal mascots, would try to steal Cookie Crisp, but Officer Crumb wouldn't allow that. This here ad is similar to the Fruity Pebbles ad we've already looked at, except this time the actual Santa Claus doesn't show up. It's nice to see even the closest thing there's ever been to a villainous cereal mascot can get some happiness around the holidays.
For those wondering, the reason why you don't see these three characters in Cookie Crisp ads nowadays is because... well, for one thing, do they even still DO Cookie Crisp ads? I can't remember the last time I've seen one on TV... but also, around 2000 the folks in charge of the Cookie Crisp ads decided to ditch Cookie Crook and Officer Crumb and just have Chip be the mascot. Then at some point they replaced him with a wolf who basically does the Trix Rabbit's shtick.
Okay, this one does have a bit of live action in it, but the majority of it is animated so I'm putting it on the list.
Who doesn't love Chuck Jones' adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas? This ad, directed by Frank Molieri at Acme Filmworks, apes the special's animation style extremely well. It actually makes me wonder why they haven't done more ads with the Chuck Jones verison of the Grinch - oh, there ARE other ads where the Grinch appears, but they all either use the 2000 live action version of the Grinch or the 2018 Illumination version of the Grinch. Very odd, seeing as he's just as iconic a Christmas character as Rudolph...
So that's a bunch of animated ads that celebrate the holiday season. With any luck, animated Christmas commercials will make a comeback at some point.
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