TCS-Cadbury Puma

Recently, Cadbury's Chocolate took a bold step forward and introduced a new set of ads to replace their traditional"Flake Girl" campaign. "Your Happiness needs Cadbury" is the tagline, and your "Happiness" is your inner animal, your fauna alter-ego, your "spirit animal", or your "familiar" (if you're a witch!). Cadbury chose red-hot commercial director Noam Murro to helm the first trio of these spots. Murro and his production company Biscuit Films turned to The Character Shop to create the incredibly realistic animatronic animals the series would require.

First up was a puma who had to slide out from under a bed, banter with her human version, and then languidly play guitar, as the woman and her "Happiness" enjoy the luxurious taste of a Cadbury's Flake bar. TCS designed and created an animatronic cougar with radio-controlled, multiple-axis eye, brow, blink, nose, jaw, ear, and lip mechanisms. A slim-wristed puppeteer put her arms through the false bottom of a bed into custom-sculpted paw-sleeves, yet another puppeteer controlled the head with an external rod, while yet two more puppeteers handled its heaving, breathing chest with a large bellows and flicked its weighted tail with a long pole and invisible thread.

As you can see from the picture above, the attention to detail, form, color, and texture is second to none. Murro was moved to praise Rick and crew with a boisterous: "You ROCK!"...Yeah, we're kind of proud of it, ourselves!

Click on the pic above to see the ad! (384x216 1.7 MB)