Hasan & Partners approached us with a catchy and funny song written for the purpose of promoting fish for younger audience and they wanted an animated ad to go along with it. We truly wanted to take on the task since it combined an inspiring synopsis with an environmentally friendly message of favouring local fish over red meat. The idea was awesome and bonkers: to have a singing fish teaching people to eat more fish. And the agency even told us not to shy too much away from the erm... cannibalistic undertones. What an opportunity!

We designed the characters and pitched in a few gags of our own. The client was open to almost all of our ideas. A group of herrings jumping off screen only to fall Monty Python-like to a frying pan? Sure, why not! An animated perch leading a choir of dead fish? Absolutely! To really give life to the characters, even if they were on screen for only a few seconds, we wrote distinct personality traits for each and everyone. From the start it was pretty clear we wanted our protagonist to have an overly optimistic attitude towards life. He's the type of fish who doesn't think failing is an option and who has a natural talent of getting everyone around him as hyped about something as he is.

The goal was to produce a perky hand-drawn commercial with an old-school flare, like something not totally out of Warner Bros' catalogue. We also wanted the characters to maintain an organic look instead of having solid colors usually associated with computer-generated images so we made sure to colour them by hand - as if they were drawn with chalk. To spice up the visuals further we made animated effects out of bits of food photography and even did a few pythonesque shots of cut-out animation.

The end result is an eye-catching feel-good animation with an appropriately twisted connotations to keep it interesting and talked about. We couldn't be prouder.