Take It As Red

I'm not sure whether to cheer in appreciation of a nice little claymation creature or march on the studio for misrepresenting the poor maligned squid...

Dancing Diablo Animates 'Monsters of the Deep' Campaign For The Franklin Institute
June 10


For The Franklin Institute’s (Philadelphia, PA) new Monsters of the Deep exhibition, ad agency Red Tettemer (Philadelphia, PA) commissioned the devilishly talented folks at the DUMBO-based Dancing Diablo Studio (DDS), which designed and produced a pair of vibrantly colored claymation :15s. The spots, Squid and Whale, began airing in the Philadelphia area on June 3, 2005.

[...]

These spots aim to show kids that monsters do not live in their closets or under their beds but reside under the sea and can be enjoyed and explored at the Franklin Institute’s Monsters of the Deep exhibition.

Squid opens in a claymation bedroom with one long purple tentacle, then another and another, emerging from under a mattress, undulating around a sleeping child, and resolving to a super which reads “Real monsters live under water. Not your bed.”

One could accuse the filmamkers of being anti-natural sciences, in describing squid as 'monsters' whn they're patently nothing of the sort. They're marine invertebrates who are mercilessly hunted and which pose little if any threat to humanity. We are destroying their habitat as surely as we are the rain forests, but with much less fuss being made. It's ok to kill 'ugly' things, they're just freaks and monsters. Cutesy cartoons like this are hardly going to encourage children to take a rational, observational attitude towards the natural world.

But on the other hand, if something gets a child interested in squid, no matter how scientifically reprehensibly presented it is, surely that's a good thing?

|