You think that you have become inured to the Christmas-advert-industrial complex’s attempts to move you. Your heart is hardened to adorable storybook characters going on a journey, tear ducts stay bone dry at melancholy covers of pop songs.
Then a supermarket sneaks up and bops you over the head with a nostalgia-bomb so targeted you wonder if the ad execs have been personally mining your own childhood for content. With no human heights left to climb after last year’s cameo from Rick Astley, the grocer has turned to fiction for its celebrity appearance this year.
Enter the Big Friendly Giant or BFG, an animated imagining of Roald Dahl’s overlarge purveyor of nice dreams. Resigned to another Christmas of disgusting snozzcumbers (the BFG having canonically forsworn eating humans), he ventures to Sainsbury’s in an attempt to find a more palatable spread (still not humans, he remains friendly at all times).
Landing in the car park out by the trolleys he meets Sophie, a Sainsbury’s employee. Going truly above and beyond traditional customer service, Sophie accompanies the BFG on a whistle-stop tour of the UK to source delicious morsels for a replacement party spread, seasoned with magic that resembles indoor fireworks. Rather than scoff the lot, they decide to quietly share it out between human households.
By using an established yet not overdone children’s book character, Sainsbury’s are cannily tapping into fond memories a chunk of the British public will have of the BFG. There was a copy of the original Eighties edition that lived at my grandparents’ house. Plus, this BFG looks like one of my late grandfather’s, to an eerie extent. As I said, precision levels of nostalgia – the perfect mix of happy-sad and sweet-bitter that you want at the death of the year.
This is no CGI-heavy, green screen cop-out. You can almost feel the ground shake as the BFG lopes across the landscape. The creative team used puppets and scale sets to create genuine interaction between Sophie and a fictional giant. It doesn’t try to overly smooth over the seams either, giving everything an almost stop-motion feel.
It’s a warm tale full of good old-fashioned magic, achieving more in a tight advert than Steven Spielberg managed in his underwhelming BFG adaptation in 2016. There is the slight hiccup that, beloved children’s author he may have been, Dahl also had utterly repugnant views that he didn’t keep to himself. His family and museum have since apologised for his antisemitism, and if you find an updated copy of the BFG you’ll find some of its language around race and gender has been edited somewhat.
Sainsbury’s seems to have stuck the landing and avoided this messy issue, focusing on a solid subtext of friendship and feeding the hungry. While you would think twice about eating a holiday dinner dropped through an open window, the message is a serious one. The supermarket has, together with Comic Relief, pledged to distribute meals to five million families experiencing food poverty. That the UK has this many hungry people, so many of them children is, frankly a travesty.
Kudos to the creative team for delivering a message without getting sanctimonious. Sophie, played by actual Sainsbury’s employee who filmed in secret for months, is a star in the making. And the original score composed by Alex Baranowski is an instant classic.
Consider my cold, cold heart warmed. Just don’t make me look at those gross snozzcumbers again.
Sainsbury’s Christmas campaign is online from 8am and on TV from 8.15pm, during Coronation Street.
