I was going to write a post joking about the movie The Grey, saying it was mean of the movie to show those guys teasing the cute hungry wolf puppies with their humany goodness and not letting them have any, but guess what: PeTA beat me to it! No surprise there, but that’s at least a survival movie, so you’d think those characters would surely have the right to defend themselves against those wild animals that are always trying to eat us all and destroy humanity all the time! (I’m on to those conspiratorial wild animals, man!) But what about these new Office Max ads where they tease, harm and abuse miniature African wild animals with their big deals? Surely PeTA will be incensed at these ads, right? (Even though they're obviously fake CGI animals. But I suppose the implied violence is real!)
And who wouldn’t be incensed? These ads show Office Max’s big deals knocking down rhinos, bouncing elephants all around after forcing them to perform circus tricks, and causing gorillas to fall from great heights to their grievous bodily harm! And they’re making light of it! Surely this deserves the mighty wrath of PeTA just as much, doesn’t it? And while I’m making fun of PeTA here (again), these commercials are definitely making a joke out of harming miniature wild animals, and that’s just mean. It’s kind of like dwarf tossing, or stand-up comedy jokes about midgets, isn’t it? But really it's just mean because they show the animals getting bowled over, knocked down from great heights, and bounced around.
If they had shown the animal looking normal, walking across the scene, and then bumping into or stopping and looking at a wall that turned out to be the shopping bag, and then the camera zooms out to show how big the bag is compared to the usually giant-looking animal, it would indicate the big deal aspect they’re going for, and it wouldn’t have been mean to or ridiculed the animals. But it also wouldn’t be as silly, and I guess that’s what they’re going for here. Oh, and then it also wouldn’t earn PeTA’s wrath, and all the free publicity that comes with it. (But then again, PeTA would probably still complain about the ones I suggested too, simply for having an animal in them: even if it were a pantomime animal!) But wouldn't it have worked better with showing the normal sized animals, and comparing them to the giant bags? Because as it is, we can clearly see these animals are intended to be miniature, so it somewhat undercuts the "big deal" message. (But it still works the way they're doing it anyway, because we all know how big these animals usually are. And they're pretty cute and fun, too. But that still does not excuse them bullying those poor defenseless CGI animals: Shame on those fake animal abusers! Where is the fake CGI PeTA on this?)
Here’s the rhino ramming spot:
Here’s the grievous gorilla gouging spot (which I saw for the first time today, 1/31/12. Note that it clearly states that the offer ends on 1/21/12, so it’s already invalid by the time they’re running the ads for it: a nice touch, to be sure!):
And here’s the elephant enslaving ad:
