Logorama

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWbXTY6TRXs

Oscar winner of the best short cartoon film, Logorama managed to raise the bar of creativity and effective criticism.

Directed by the French François Alaux, Logorama provides an insight into the gravity of control that brands and products have over our lives. The film is about a world of logos and mascots of famous labels and logos and how they’re ruling the world and taking over it. It is an exaggerated attempt to show the magnitude and severity of product placement. Unlike other film, where directors show a product’s name or logo in several frames to advertise it, Logorama puts the idea of product placement boldly out there.

It basically discusses how capitalistic companies are taking over the realm of reality and turning everything into profit or monopolizing the markets surrounding us to gain maximum marketing space in the ongoing globalized markets of the world.

What makes this film special is that it shows how gigantic companies control our world, and how media is working hand-by-hand with these companies to achieve the ultimate profit possible. According to Grazian, author of the book Mix it, the domination of culture industries used media and advertisement and brand exposure as means to manipulate consumers. He adds: “The end result is a world that feeds on style over substance, superficiality over gravities, and myth over reality.” (Grazian, p.64, 2010)

One more interesting aspect of this short animation is the amount of stereotyping that was inserted through the characters’ behaviors that people generally conceive about these characters. As a lot of people associate the image of the clown with evil, the director intentionally created Ronald McDonald as the evil man with the guns set out to kill everyone and steal everything with no specific purpose. While the good guys, the cops were the righteous Michelin men who were trying to stop the ‘crazy’ clown from going on a killing spree.

All in all, it is very clear that this movie has an agenda to show the world how much the corporate world and the capitalizing minds of the markets are integrated in our lives in a way that got us oblivious to what surrounds us in reality.