Move over Wes Anderson, there's a new twee game in town: it's Airbnb's latest commercial, which can only be described as the world's most intricate model train experience.
The brand is so pleased with the videos' performance since release that it will soon be translated into multiple languages and published worldwide.
The esthetic is most certainly cutesy and will likely anger some of the more skeptically sensitive out there. Even so, there's no denying how interesting and compelling the hand-made narrative is, especially as it unfolds amidst such remarkably different and visually complex landscapes.
In case you missed it, here it is in all its intricate glory:
The creative juice behind the commercial came from CIRKUS, a New Zealand and New York-based studio that specializes in intricate animations that blend the physical and digital in fully immersive ways. That includes using stop-motion and live-action to combine techniques that become a part of the story.
It took a team of 30 people 5 weeks to build the 85 square meter set, which included 30 cubic meters of foam to build the outlines of the shapes.
During the shoot, they had nearly a dozen people running through the track to make the mechanical transitions, and ended up going through 85 takes to deliver that perfect take.