Hinode shows its rice running through the finish line of a marathon in this commercial demonstrating the healthiness of their rice. But if their rice is this physically fit, then won’t it be able to jump out of the package and run away? And if each individual grain of rice tries to escape, and has this much stamina, how could we possibly catch it all to eat it? Oh, well; maybe this is what they mean when they say it’s so healthy for us: because we’ll get in really good shape chasing all the rice around our kitchens trying to cook and eat it.
This ad campaign, while actually quite fun, is a bit odd in that the “rice” they show running and such looks a lot more like pistachio nuts than rice. And with it moving around like it is, it makes me think more of bugs than of rice. There’s a certain kind of small brown bugs that used to get into our food cabinets in Massachusetts when I was a little kid, and they looked just like the grains of animated rice from these ads. I don’t know if anyone else notices this, or feels this way, but if so, then this would be extremely detrimental to the message this ad campaign is trying to send. Also, the rice puppets look a lot like peanuts as well (de-shelled, de-skinned peanuts, that is), and since some people are deathly allergic to peanuts, that might work against the message of this ad for some people on a subliminal level. So while I think the ads are really fun and cute, I believe they would work a whole lot better if the rice puppets looked more like actual grains of rice than they do.
Here’s the race-running rice representation:
