I don’t like advertisements. They are annoying and too ubiquitous; I do everything I can to block and avoid them.
But I find PES: Peace Eco Smile very interesting.
Peace Eco Smile is an advertising campaign for Toyota Motor Corporation. Promotional anime? Sounds like a corruption doesn’t it? I can only say it is about time advertising became a way to tell stories instead of simply hawk products.
Studio 4°C is behind the animation of PES, and the animation of the trailer is impressive. The series promotes the Prius, Prius Liftback, and the Prius C. The anime makes the connection that the Prius is the car of the future. The series main characters, PES ( a space traveler) and NaSuBi ( a mysterious life form who falls in love with Earth) choose these car models over all others. Interestingly the cars look to be important characters in their own right. I expect they will be as important as mecha are to that genre.The trailer hints that the series will be a sci-fi love story.
The trailer animation vibrates with bright hopeful colors.It has a feel of being a love child of an Impressionist and Futurism painting clothed with bright Warhol.
Although the line ” The world is full of energy…the energy of love” is a cheesy promotional tagline, the advertising campaign looks to keep the ad push to a minimum; excluding the presence of the mecha-Prius aspects.
Watch the trailer:
[flv]http://media.japanpowered.com/videos/peace-eco-smile.flv[/flv]
We shall see how each of the monthly 4 minute long web-episodes play out. I find the advertising idea refreshing. There needs to be less advertising around (we filter out about 80% of it anyway). What advertising we see should play like miniature television series where the products the company is marketing take the backseat to the story but still remain prominent. Cell phone companies could play a soap opera like series and often show scenes of people talking on the newest phone models. Anime could work the same way. It would be pretty easy to market food brands in comedy anime, for example.
Watch for the episodes on Toyota’s PES: Peace Eco Smile website.