Cats and dogs are fundamentally incompatible. At least, according to traditional assumption. The fact that, as I write this, innumerable Fidos and Cleos the world over are occupying the same porches and kitchen floors without skirmish is not going to deter us from seeing the two as diametrically opposed; forces of nature as irreconcilable as fire and ice. It's certainly the case that wild felids and canids have long competed with one another for food sources and apex predator status, but when it comes to domestic dogs and cats, the nature of this heated rivalry may be more a reflection of human vanity than anything else - dogs and cats are the two most popular varieties of house pet, and what they are now in inadvertent competition for is our favour. Wherever our own allegiances fall in this ongoing stand-off (whether we identify as dog people or cat people, if either) inevitably ends up saying something about our own personality clashes. On top of which, there is something endearingly Odd Couple about the notion of two species that would not ordinarily be inclined to mix being made to co-exist within the same confined, highly artificial spaces; it seems unavoidable that the pair would end up getting on one another's nerves. Cats and dogs are like the ultimate sitcom roommates, their enmity both a perfectly mundane fact of life, and a perfectly neurotic emblem for the intrinsically chaotic nature of the universe.
That's the thinking behind this 2012 campaign from Bartle Bogle Hegarty, in which a pack of dogs gains entry into an all-cat party thanks to the one patch of common ground shared by the two ancient adversaries (at least, in the context of this advert) - a weakness for fruit-based soft drinks. The instant the dogs walk through the door and find themselves surrounded by a sea of suspicious feline peepers, we know that these would-be party animals are well out of their element. Fortunately, these dogs had the foresight to come with a pack of Brtivic J2O, which melts the cats' hostilities, and the two tribes manage to put aside their differences for the sake of having a really top notch gathering. Some of the cats and dogs even appear to begin tangling in a romantic sense, which might be the ultimate transgression of the established norm (one of the dogs seems to draw the line at being encouraged to eat cat food, though). This breakdown of canine/feline antipathy could only represent the tip of the iceberg in an incoming age of interspecies harmony - at the end of the ad, the door bell rings, and that other well-known enemy of all things feline enters the party, bearing their own crate of J2O (there is, nevertheless, something a little ghoulish in the way the British Blue keeps licking their lips while greeting them). The obvious teaching being that J2O stands for fun and celebration; a reminder that our shared love of a good time should take precedent over whatever compulsion we have to scratch each other's hair out. And what better way to illustrate that than with a miraculous, Britvic-facilitated truce between our own longtime feuding companions?
It sounds like an utterly adorable scenario on paper, but what makes the ad unnerving is the surreal visual strategy used to animate the dogs and cats, in superimposing animal faces onto human bodies - a choice registered with startling dissonance in the opening moments, when we see a human hand wipe away the vapor from a taxi cab's window, shortly before our protagonist's pug features emerge into view. The freakiness of the spot is merely reinforced by that rather...suspect song playing in the background ("Pussy cat" by DJ Yoda). The obvious temptation nowadays, when contemplating efforts to represent house pets through distortions of the human form, would be to compare it to the eyeball-searing visuals in Tom Hooper's 2019 adaptation of the Broadway musical Cats, but I think that does a tremendous disservice to the flesh and blood critters featured here, who are as charming as you would imagine. The only point in the ad where I detect that level of skin-crawling uncanniness is during a background gag, when one of the cats dunks their distinctively human hand into a goldfish bowl and pilfers one of the unfortunate orange carps swimming around therein. That might be taking the joke a mite too far. Otherwise, the ad's off-centre flavour derives from the conspicuous mismatch between the fundamental cuteness of the faces of the real animals and the confounding wrongness of the human frames to which they are apparently affixed, so that it looks, appealingly, like one of those collages you create by cutting up and rearranging pictures from magazines. The human mannerisms handle much of the narrative weightlifting - even before we've reached the cats' party, tension is established in the the offhand manner with which the pug is charged with carrying the J2Os, indicating that he is the omega of this particular pack and setting up for a moment of catharsis when the items in question end up being the all-important tension dissolver - but it's the expressiveness of the animals (the nervousness of the pug, the by turns standoffishness and playful curiosity of the cats, etc) that has the real emotional resonance.
What I'm most inclined to liken it to is the works of William Wegman, a visual artist famed for his photographs of Weimaraners with human bodies (Wegman, working in the age before digital manipulation, had to be deeply creative in how he pulled off the juxtaposition). Like Wegman's Weimaraners, these juice-swilling party animals provide a distorted mirror image - one that's eccentric and endearing on one level while on another hammering home the intrinsic freakiness of the human form; how familiar and yet weirdly monstrous it looks when taken out of place. Our canine and feline friends have long served as reflections of who we are - in this instance, what else are they saying but that we're all one another's neurotic sitcom roommates, slowly chipping away at each other's nerves in our confined, highly artificial environs? But we'll keep dreaming of the day when we can throw all our differences to the wind and just get down together.
No comments:
Post a Comment