Joanna Quinn Charmin Adverts

       Joanna Quinn's series of adverts for Charmin, featuring a variety of animals from bears to sloths to flamingos, are a seemingly perfect choice to demonstrate the gentle softness the company no doubt wished to depict.

 

 

       With only a limited amount of time (approximately 30 seconds) to communicate an idea, there is a lot of pressure within commercial animation to make every second count. Every aspect of Quinn's animation from the pencil lines, the muted, almost pastel colour palette and rounded character design suggests cushiony softness.

 

 

        Using hand drawn animation (Quinn's signature design) creates a mellow effect that would have been difficult to replicate with the cleaner, crisper lines of 2D computer animation. The lines and colours change subtly from frame to frame which makes the animation flicker slightly; not enough to disrupt viewing, but to give the adverts a comforting, cosy quality. As Quinn's animations were also used for a not dissimilar campaign for Whiskas cat food, it must have been a style that appealed to audiences.

 

        Yet while these adverts are recognizably Quinn's, her animations are not always quite so gentle. The fluid lines are used in Britannia, Body Beautiful and The Wife of Bath for a quite different effect. The movement between frames works extremely well as the characters transform and shape shift between dog and Queen Victoria, and as a middle aged woman's body morphs into that of a body builder. The animation style manages to make such dramatic changes seem easy and naturalistic as one image simply flows into another.

A still from The Wife of Bath, but it works on its own.

        As she works using animation paper, drawing each frame one after another, Quinn's work lends itself to the flip book format, as not only can you watch the animation sequence as a whole, it is easy to stop, look and admire individual frames as beautiful drawings in their own right.