A chicken is riding a unicycle along the seafront. Past beach umbrellas, through a souvenir shop, out into the sunshine again. Nobody seems nearly concerned enough. The chicken is having a lovely day.
This is Plant Beast, Nick Tasker's ad for a fictional brand of plant-based nuggets. Its entire pitch is a bird enjoying the sort of afternoon it might have if we left it off the menu. It's ridiculous, immediately understandable and very hard not to enjoy.
A very demanding chicken
Tasker made the film with early access to Alibaba's WAN 3.0. He wrote the ad and prepared a treatment first, then worked through repeated generations and plenty of chickens that didn't make the cut.
He credits WAN 3.0's ability to generate 30 seconds at a time with helping the bird, the location and the light stay consistent. That matters here because we're following a little journey. The pleasure is in watching this particular chicken get on with its day, rather than meeting a different-looking bird every few seconds.
One silly idea, all the way through
The warm light, the tiny pedals and the completely ordinary seaside surroundings give the nonsense somewhere convincing to happen. The ad takes its chicken seriously enough that we can relax and enjoy how absurd it is.
Then the line arrives: “Let's give chicken a break.” The little holiday suddenly becomes the whole argument for the product. No complicated explanation required.