It’s not often that an automotive ad gets us excited around here, but if you haven’t seen Honda’s latest television spot, we urge you to click the “play” arrow on the video below, sit back and enjoy. You don’t even need to be a fan of their products to enjoy watching its history literally unfold before your eyes. It’s so visually arresting that even non-car-guys will enjoy it!
Honda has a long and notable history as a company with clever engineering and winning ways at the showroom and at the race track. From stationary engines to motorized to bicycles to race-winning motorcycles to outboard motors to Formula 1-winning race cars and on to jets and robots, it’s all in the ad. It even caps off with the HondaJet dropping, via parachute, the powerplant into the 2017 Acura NSX, Honda’s Ohio-built, mid-engined supercar that is set for production any day now. The NSX then tears off into the Arizona horizon on two-lane blacktop.
The two-minute ad debuted in late September during a CBS Sports football broadcast. A visual sensation that encompasses thousands of individually hand-drawn images, the ad does a bang-up job of showing the many machines Honda has created over the years, including everything from Isle of Man TT-winning bikes to lawnmowers.
Instead of using computer-generated imaging, Honda went old school for this ad titled “Paper.” Every frame is hand-drawn and moved by hand, the artists’ own fingers seen in almost every frame, flipping, turning and manipulating the individual drawings and pieces of paper shown throughout the ad. It’s worth spending another two-and-a-half minutes to see how some of it was done.
Honda hired the award-winning animator Adam Pesapane, who goes by the name PES, to create the hand-drawn, stop-motion masterpiece that tells the history of the company. PES and his team of animators and artists used CGI techniques to storyboard the ad before getting down to work on the actual hand drawings that make up the ad.
To get an idea of the effort that went into its creation, take a closer look at each frame, where the artists’ hands are shown flipping their many drawings. A lot of those drawings were used for just one frame of the film, as the perspective of the camera and the car, or plane, motorcycle, boat, octopus—whatever, was changing constantly. Yes, a giant octopus emerges from the sea, stripping off a current Pilot’s bodywork as its engine moves along the history timeline to become the 1.5-liter V-12 that powered American Richie Ginther’s RA272 race car to victory at the 1965 Mexican Grand Prix—a first for a Japanese car or engine. Also, note that the layout of the ad that tells Honda’s history, was created on a single, giant table, with the camera overhead.
Honda’s ad takes a pause to insert the line “you never know where a dream will lead you” and finishes with Honda’s current tagline “The Power of Dreams.” Advertisements are supposed to get your attention, but this one takes it further and can actually be seen as inspiring. Kudos to Honda for sharing such a clever take on their rich history
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