“Plato” is a blue alien character created for a series of Sony Walkman ads (watch them here and here). It’s always a little hard to tell watching heavily compressed video on YouTube, but I’m pretty sure he was realized as a Bunraku-style puppet.

Special thanks to “Rockin’ Rob” for originally pointing these out!

Badly performed puppets starring in a commercial for zero calorie gelatin in Japan (I have no idea).

Via Japan Probe.

This is a new commercial for Burger King in Germany that features marionettes. The puppets in the ad were built by Hornet Inc. and performed by James Godwin, Tim Lagasse and Steve Widerman.

To promote their spring and summer collections this year, Gap commissioned five original songs based on a specific color and a corresponding video for each. My favourite of these is Black / White, which features a song by Danish post-punk duo The Raveonettes and a stunning blend of filmed shadow puppets and computer animation (to really appreciate it you really have to watch it multiple times). The video was directed by Chris Do of BL:IND; you can check out lots of “making of” goodies from the project here.

Link via Motiongrapher via Brian.

When trying to invent ways to sell bug killer I’m not sure that Bunraku puppets would be the first thing to jump in to my head. Then again, I don’t live in Japan.

When I first saw this talking stain commercial for the “Tide To Go” stain remover last year I mistakenly assumed it had been done with CG. It wasn’t. Turns out it was good `ol fashioned puppetry by Flexitoon Puppets (you can see it in the Flexitoon commercial demo reel).

This ad – which originally aired during the 2008 Superbowl – was so popular that Tide built a contest around it, encouraging filmmakers to shoot and submit their own Talking Stain spoofs to www.mytalkingstain.com.

This is Best Buy marionette commercial was made back in 2004, but I only recently discovered it. Does anyone know who did it?

I love Hungry, the mascot of the Weight Watchers’ Momentum Program. We’re seeing a lot of this kind of thing in commercials and music videos and I think that this style of performing is probably the future of puppetry in film and video in general.

Hat tip to Ron for sending in yet another great link!

This is a great TV commercial for Optimum, which is a regional cable company that serves the New York/tristate area if I’m not mistaken. It that features some really nice Bunraku-style puppetry, but I can’t help noticing that several of the puppets suffer from the infamous “Elmo-style dancing hips”. I wonder if there’s a place in New York or L.A. where they teach that to puppeteers, or if people just like to lift Kevin Clash’s moves?

Ah, the geeky puppet things I think about…

One of the latest viral sensations on YouTube is an ad for Drench Bottled Water in the UK featuring Brains (one of the characters from Gerry Anderson’s classic Thunderbirds TV series) dancing to SNAP’s `90s hit Rhythm is a Dancer. The old Thunderbirds “Supermarionation” techniques were updated to produce the ad, which was created using a mixture of motion capture, computer animation and good old fashioned string puppetry.

The team of puppeteers who worked on the video was led by Ronnie LeDrew, who’s no stranger to these sorts of viral marketing campaigns; he was the puppeteer responsible for the Levis “Giant Marionette” videos a couple years ago. You can watch the video below:

…as well as take a short look behind the scenes:

Special thanks to Ron for writing in with this!