"A Future Begins"

21 November 2021

2 mins 23s

Old friends.

It's been almost ten years since a Johnny Kelly commercial for Chipotle cleaned up at the Cannes Advertising Festival, and the restaurant chain have decided to mark that anniversary by asking Kelly to revisit the world he created, and tell a new story about its characters.

The farmer whose Damascene conversion lay at the centre of the 2012 film is still running his principled farm at the start of the new commercial. The subtlety of Kelly's characterisations make it hard to be certain that his feeling sad when his son heads off to university, but we certainly get the feeling that the parting is painful for both of them. We see father and son inhabiting their separate worlds, with carefully structured parallels between the two... until disaster befalls the older man.

With his dad's fate uncertain, his son hurries home to the rescue... buying the farm (in the conventional sense!) and adhering to the principled practices which he learned from him. Kelly's animation is such a perfect vehicle for the story – it's so recognisable that it's iconic, and immediately delivers us back into this world. It's the pinnacle of achievement in animation to create something so resonant that the audience immediately knows where they are, and – even more astonishingly – the ethical approach being advocated. His characters are rounded in every sense and it's actually surprising that it's taken this long to revisit the farm. We want more.

USA

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