You are now entering Ad Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …

The Product:
Zellers toys

The Promotions:

The Pitch:
It was a tough sell getting Batman to abandon their war on crime to focus exclusively on combatting high toy prices, but the results speak for themselves.

Batman is no stranger to animation. The Caped Crusader has been adapted into cartoons countless times, from the stiff movements of the early Filmation and Hanna-Barbera series, to the mix of grit and stylization in Batman: The Animated Series, to the varied anime styles of Batman: Gotham Knight, to the unique presentation of The Lego Batman Movie.

Given that competition, who’d have thought some of the most fluid and expressive Batman animation out there would come, not from a movie or TV show, but from these ads for a Canadian department store?

Just look at these things! I know that they saved money by reusing most of the animation from commercial to commercial, but even so. It almost feels like the animation is too good for a TV commercial. Like someone at the marketing department wildly overestimated what making these ads would cost, and the animators had to put in a lot of extra polish to use up their budget.

Makes for some striking ads, though. I’m not from Canada, so I probably never saw these ads as a kid – but if I had, I think they’d have definitely had an effect, even if wee little me didn’t understand exactly how animation worked.