More National: Honda Odyssey


At least I’m pretty sure it’s National. I saw this Honda Odyssey spot on TV and instantly looked it up. I love the fluidity of the animation, the cleverness of each vignette (the suggestive puff of smoke is my favorite), and the preciseness of the execution (the swirling paint portrait is incredible).

And while I was looking for that spot, I discovered the National Television blog, National Television Workshop. Is this old news? I don’t know, maybe I’ve been living under a rock.

The Odyssey spot, by the way, reminds me of the fantastic TV Land IDs that Buck did (under Broadcast on their site). Both riff on cultural clichés to appeal to the Baby Boomer generation. Buck’s have a nice stylistic gloss to them that unifies their diverse treatments, while National went for more of a fuzzy-around-edges, nostalgic feel.

“The Van is Back” on National’s site | On YouTube

About the author

Justin Cone

/ justincone.com
Together with Carlos El Asmar, Justin co-founded Motionographer, F5 and The Motion Awards. He currently lives in Austin, Texas with is wife, son and fluffball of a dog. Before taking on Motionographer full-time, Justin worked in various capacities at Psyop, NBC-Universal, Apple, Adobe and SCAD.

9 Comments

thelastmixtape

wow! really love this spot, especially the trippy oil section, anyone any ideas how they produced that part?? cleaver compositing or realflow?? anyhoo, great spot…

Jean_Pierre

visually impressive. but I think that the concept is lacking. sure, try to pull some emotional strings and connect with your audience. I think that this honda mini-van commercial trys to reach too far to make the connection and comes off just a little bit disconnected.

Babe

wow.. is that hobo?

THA_DON

mnx,

old news.

Joe Clay

I caught just the spirograph part last night and while it was cool, it made me wonder what the hell it had to do with anything but nostalgia. After seeing “The van is back” and the rest of the commercial it makes a lot more sense. Still, that makes me wonder if the concept is unified.

Beautiful spot when you see the whole thing but an absolute disaster if you miss the beginning. Lucky for them, commercials usually run more than once :)

sonnyslade

may be the oldest spot running on tv.

this spot is solid and executed well but I prefer the live action version of this spot. it’s really fun, especially for an agency (RPA) that typically has lackluster creative.

Matt

Icky YouTube compression. Here’s a nicer looking version from National TV’s website:
https://www.natl.tv/projects/48

justin

Excellent. Just updated the post. Thanks, Matt.

monovich

nice! love the seamlessness of it all. Would love to also know how they did it.

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