Starship Blogbook

Pixar’s Purl is a Sparkshots short film featuring an animated ball of yarn trying to fit in at her new job in an all-male startup company called B.R.O.. Via Short of the Week:

Though Pixar have become somewhat synonymous in the world of animated shorts, finding these films online is more of a rarity, than a common occurrence. However, this all looks to change with their latest program SparkShorts, a series of films designed to discover new storytellers, explore new storytelling techniques, and experiment with new production workflows, that all look set to be released online. Kicking off this series, is Kristen Lester’s Purl, a deceptively cute tale of toxic masculinity in the workplace.

Set in the high-powered world of B.R.O capital, Purl follows its titular central character as she goes to work in a male-dominated office and finds herself struggling to fit in. A story centred around themes of belonging and understanding, Purl is left with a tough decision – change her ways to fit in or carry on being herself and face a life of loneliness and isolation at work. The story was obviously a personal one for writer/director Lester, as she reveals in this Meet the Filmmakers video:

“It’s based on my experience being in animation”, says Lester, “my first job, I was like the only woman in the room and so in order to do the thing that I loved, I sort of became one of the guys. Then, I came to Pixar and I started to work on teams with women for the first time and that actually made me realise how much of the female aspect of myself I had sort of buried and left behind”.

Burger King had a surprising ad for Superbowl which was accused of being “advertising for advertising people”. It involved Andy Warhol. Yes, the real Andy Warhol, eating a Whopper. Via AdAge:

In the future, maybe everyone will eat a Whopper for 15 minutes. Or at least 45 seconds.

“I still remember the first time I watched the complete length of the film of Andy Warhol eating a Burger King Whopper, and my head exploded,” says Fernando Machado, Burger King’s global chief marketing officer. “I was like, ‘Is that really Andy Warhol; why is he eating that? What’s happening there?'”

A few years later, an advertising dream of Machado’s has come true. Burger King, with the help of agency David Miami, got the rights to use footage of Warhol from “Andy Warhol Eating a Hamburger,” directed by JØrgen Leth, in its Super Bowl spot. The full scene originally appeared in Leth’s 1982 film “66 Scenes from America.”

“One of the things that was unique about the negotiation was that we didn’t want to change or touch the film in any way that would take away from its original intent,” says Marcelo Pascoa, Burger King’s global head of brand marketing. “We knew that the best thing we could do would be to keep the film as intact as we could.”

Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds bury the hatchet by making ads for each other. Or did they…. Via News.com.au:

With muscles like those, you’d think they’d fight it out offline.

Marvel men Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman have put to peace their fan favourite internet feud. The ultimate truce maker? An advertising collaboration, of course.

“Official truce with @realhughjackman! As a gesture of goodwill, I’m gonna make a beautiful ad for his company, Laughing Man Coffee. Can’t wait!” Reynolds tweeted, along with a photo of him and Jackman holding hands.

Hey, even these superheroes are willing to put their pride aside when there’s a money-making ad opportunity at hand. The Twitter war between the Wolverine and Deadpool actors has been brewing online since 2017, much to the enjoyment of their respective fanbases. Highlights of the ribbing have included Jackman asking viewers to urinate on Reynold’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star, and Reynolds tweeting, “Pretty sure those are protesters,” in response to a post of Jackman posing with fans in Beijing.

The result was a heartfelt ad by Ryan Reynolds for Hugh Jackman’s coffee company, albeit with a painful pun involving Hugh’s name… and a less-than-heartfelt ad by Hugh for Ryan’s gin company. Watch it.

Chance the Rapper x Backstreet Boys for Doritos. That’s right. The Backstreet Boys are still alive. Their band name hasn’t aged well. We could link you a glowing review of the ad, which while we didn’t think was great was at least amusing to us, but here’s Rolling Stone magazine being really upset about it instead:

Doritos has a new flavor: Doritos® Flamin’ Hot® Nacho. Instead of rolling the new chip out in a reasonable manner, a marketing team decided to play millennial musical Mad Libs to the tune of (presumably) millions of dollars. The result is Chance the Rapper remixing The Backstreet Boys’ classic “I Want It That Way” into a dreadful piece of advertising disguised as a sickly sweet nostalgia cocktail for the Rap Caviar set.

Imagining the target demographic of this monstrosity is a baffling exercise. The only connective tissue between “I Want It That Way” and Chance the Rapper is that the former released on April 12th, 1999, and the latter was born on April 16th, 1993, which means that both the hit song and the hatted musician are technically Aries. Besides that, it isn’t clear who in the world thinks Chance rapping “Hot stuff all over my nachos/Walkin’ like a taco/Driving over potholes/Hotter than a pot roast” is a worthwhile thing to put into the world, even if the end goal is as modest as selling some spicy chips.

Another year, another Superbowl Alexa commercial. This one isn’t as funny as 2018’s, but at least it has Harrison Ford and a cute dog. Via Digital Trends:

Amazon’s having fun with Alexa with this year’s Super Bowl Sunday TV commercial. The online retail giant is set to run at least one television commercial for the Amazon Beta Testing Program during Super Bowl 53 this Sunday, February 3. After seeing Amazon’s earlier teaser videos we guessed that the program has something to do with Amazon’s Alexa digital voice assistant, and we were right. Check out the video at the top of this article.

To spark interest in the so-far-under-wraps announcement, Amazon enlisted actors, comedians, and astronauts in short teaser ads. In the ads, actors Harrison Ford and Forest Whitaker, Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer from Broad City, and NASA astronauts and twin brothers Mark and Scott Kelly all react to That-Which-Is-Still-Secret.

In each video, the actor slides open a two-section horizontal shutter or door, looks at what’s inside, and utters a short reaction. What each clip has in common is that the contents emit or reflect blue Amazon Echo light that illuminates the character’s face. The inside surface looks like egg-crate acoustic soundproofing, but no further details are visible. All that Amazon mentions in conjunction with the teasers is “Amazon recruited some famous friends to test new Alexa technologies. To see what happened, tune into the big game on 2.3.19.”

Here’s what happened when we acted on the suggestion to ask Alexa:

DT: “Alexa, what is the Amazon Beta Testing Program?”

Alexa: “I’m not supposed to talk about the confidential Amazon Beta Testing Program until the big game on February 3. However, I think you can keep a secret. Just say this access code: Blue 126. Again that’s Blue 126.”