Visually and musically magnificent.

[fpb]

I just saw this, and it blew me away:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iXwzBvdrIY
But isn't it tragic that, not only the awe-inspiring images, but even the stunning music, were, according to this answer:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080502154518AATbciQ
were all composed for no better reason than to encourage people to get pissed on vodka?

Comments

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

It is gorgeous, but it rather reminds me of the Rickards Red (a beer) commericials that ran in Canada last year with music from the Carmina Burana (sorry, I looked for a You Tube clip and could only find a much stupider Australian ad for a different beer). There is much of the same sly sense of humour - a trait also shared with other previous Smirnoff ads. In this one the sea gets tired of humans throwing junk in and throws it back. The one that made me laugh last year featured preppy "gangstas"

The marketing people's botton line is selling vodka. They really don't care if you get drunk or use it to clean your windows (something I have done with vodka since it was cheaper than Windex when I lived in Praugue). The creative people are often out to create something that amuses themselves and the product it get applied to is sometimes incidental.

[tashmania.livejournal.com]

You know, this is one of my favourite adverts of recent years - it's a great concept for a tagline of 'purification', it's visually stunning and the music is superb. And I agree completely with you - it's sad that the thrust of it is to encourage alcohol consumption.

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

This ad encouraged people who get pissed to clean up their act and live cleaner. (Said the vodka drinker who would really like to get pissed but can't because her children are watching.) It's not encouraging people to get pissed. It's just associating cleverness with the same stuff that people get pissed with. It's hard to clean up the image of a product that people associate with vomit and irresponsability.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Did you ever see Miyazaki Hayao's Porco Rosso (Kurenai no buta in Japanese)? The airplanes rising out of the sea reminded me of a scene in that film.

As I remarked on sartorias's page (she linked to it too after seeing your post), I thought the Colossus of Rhodes and the Viking ship were nice touches!

Since advertising is likely to be with us always, it's fun when the ads are entertaining.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Sure did. I have the movie (in Italian, yet!) on CD. And what I regret is that this is an epic idea - the visual incarnation of that terrible sentence, "when the sea gives up its dead" - and that it comes neither as the climax nor as the centre of anything important.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yes, it was a strange film that way. Hard to get a sense of what *was* the center.

[nicked-metal.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that it had one. It was a movie about this pig who makes his way back to being a man, but it was much more about being a man (and/or a pig) than about any kind of 'center'.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It was gorgeous to look at - a Japanese man's idea of Italy, and with some glaring mistakes (Milan does not have a major river), but ravishing.

[nicked-metal.livejournal.com]

And I think that was the point, as much as anything else :)