Wieden + Kennedy enlists Nimura Daisuke and Alva Skog for Coca-Cola’s Open campaign

Wieden + Kennedy has launched a multi-disciplinary campaign for Coca-Cola that enlists a fine team of creative collaborators, with the grand intentions of encouraging us to listen and have empathy for one another. Working with Somesuch’s director Steve Rogers on the live action ad starring Natasha Lyonne, and illustrators Alva Skog and Nimura Daisuke on can design and animation, and a comic-strip style print campaign, respectively, the Open campaign centres around a theme of saving the world, but not with super heroes.

The film shows snapshots of various squabbles around a city, where small arguments turn to bigger ones, and start to affect the infrastructure of the city itself. As it starts to crumble and fall to ruin, and a pair of fighting superheroes crash to the ground, the unlikely saviour – Russian Doll’s famously straight-talking Natasha Lyonne – turns up. “Woah, woah, woah guys, this isn't how you save the world,” she says. “Everyone's obsessed with being right about everything. I don’t know, if you asked yourself could I be the one who's wrong, maybe things could change for the better.”

In tandem, the print campaign by Japanese illustrator Nimura Daisuke features panel comics in Coke’s red, white and black colour scheme, showing his distinctive, charming characters in “before and after” frames that W+K says are “designed to help bridge the empathy gap”. In one, a girl and a boy in ‘yes’ and ‘no’ T-shirts unite to cosy up inside a ‘maybe’ jacket; and another shows friends not noticing each other on the train until they take the time to look up. Another adorable vignette shows two cacti shedding their spines to hold hands / branches. For the digital part of the campaign, Daisuke's illustrations are animated by Jelly Kitchen.

Alva Skog worked on can design for the campaign, and the animated sequence at the end of the live action ad – also produced by Jelly Kitchen – showing a fist bump transitioning into the Coca-Cola wave.

The Open campaign will across Europe.