This Adorable 3D Animated Supermarket Christmas Ad Is Melting Hearts Everywhere
French animators just showed billion-dollar companies how it's done.
No one expects much from company ads, yet over the past couple of years, holiday commercials have become hard to watch. This week brought us a dystopian McDonald's AI ad, right after the now-traditionally weird AI Coca-Cola one, but at least this ad might actually put a smile on your face.
Called The Unloved, this 3D short for French supermarket chain Intermarché by WIZZ and Illogic Studios, tells the story of a lonely wolf who abandons his villainous ways and carnivorous cravings, turning to culinary creativity to make friends.
Apparently, the artistic direction was all about creating a world straight out of a child's imagination. The team avoided the hyper-realistic 3D look often seen in blockbusters, instead leaning on styles from Christmas stories and children's books. Here are some 2D designs of the animals featured in the short:
The Unloved
The Unloved
The Unloved
"The aesthetic aim was to play with how traditional fairytales are so often presented in animation, doing something unique, rather than doing something that looks Pixar-esque, breaking that 3D look," says Amanda Stubbs, Executive Producer at WIZZ. "It was almost trying to give that brush stroke texture on there as well, making reference to hand-drawn stories that we were used to looking at and reading when we were younger. There is a slightly painterly effect on top of the 3D, which creates something that feels really crafted."
And it's getting a lot of love online. The commercial's on Letterboxd, and people are creating fan art for The Unloved:
Amid the flood of AI-generated content making things tough for creative industries in 2025, this example pretty much says it all. There's nothing quite like human-made art, created with care and skill, and other companies could learn a lot from it.
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