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:
Whiskas cat food

The Promotions:

The Pitch:
If you’re a cat owner, you can’t say no to cartoon cats this adorable. And if you’re not a cat owner … well, we’re a cat food company; we don’t give a shit about you.

Several times here on Ad Space, I’ve chosen to spotlight commercials that stood out from the pack, not by having a unique gimmick or clever idea behind them, but by having, just, absurdly good animation. Like, if a you made a whole feature film that looked this good … well, it’d still probably lose the Best Animated Feature Oscar to whatever Disney put out that year, but animation nerds would gripe endlessly about how it should have one.

We’ve had the Zellers ads with a ridiculously expressive Batman & Robin, a 7Up ad with a very 70’s neon lightshow aesthetic, some Superman anti-smoking ads from Academy Award winning animator Richard Williams, and (my favorite) a Chevron commercial whose animation is so much wilder and more creative than it has any right to be.

And I think these Whiskas ads make a fine addition to that collection. Not only is the animation on the cats very fluid and expressive, but it’s all done in such a pleasing, distinctive style.

The pastel coloring and lack of hard outlines gives everything such a gentle feel – even as it’s engaging in some “cats can be jerks, huh?” humor, the visuals keep it all charmingly domestic.

I kind of adore the design of the cats’ human owner. They’re not a realistic looking person – it’s still clearly a stylized design. But there’s so much detail put into the design, it feels real, while still not seeming out of place next to the more cartoonified cats.

And I don’t know what you call the technique used to make the cats’ fur seem to be constantly shifting, but it’s used brilliantly here to make their fur actually look as soft and fuzzy as actual fur (which you so rarely get in animation, given that drawing each individual hair would be … a strain).

Just some very pretty looking cartoons of cats – and if sharing that with others isn’t what the Internet is for, then I don’t even know what we’re doing here.