"Our job is to plant seeds so our grandkids can get to enjoy the fruit. So eat well, Alice, and continue planting those seeds."
"Dear Alice" is an animated advertisement by London-based animation studio The Line for yogurt brand Chobani. Released in 2021, it also features music by Joe Hisaishi.
The ad depicts a Solar Punk future where a female farmer and her peers utilize clean technology to maintain their lush farms. The titular Alice is the woman's school-aged daughter, who is fully appreciating her ancestor's efforts to maintain the environment.
It can be viewed here
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Tropes:
- Affectionate Gesture to the Head: At the lunch, the woman fondly pats the head of a young boy sitting at the table.
- Ambiguously Brown: The people are a variety of skin tones. Alice and her mother are dark-skinned but don't appear to be any particular ethnicity.
- Artificial Limbs: The dog resting near the table during lunch has a sleek prosthetic foreleg.
- Caring Gardener: The female farmer is shown harvesting peaches for donations, helping feed her community and being a caring mother while also maintaining a beautiful garden of flowers around her home in addition to running her small farm.
- Everything Is An I Pod In The Future: In the depicted futuristic farm, everything is monitored through sleek teal screens.
- Food Porn: The harvested food eaten at lunchtime and stored in the fridge is very lushly and appetizingly drawn to emphasize the high quality of agriculture in the Solar Punk setting.
- Flying Car: Alice goes to school in a flying school bus.
- High-Tech Hexagons: All the roofs on the farms have large sections of shiny hexagons, which appear to be solar panels able to double as skylights.
- Solar Punk: The ad portrays a world where high technologies are hand-in-hand with sustainable living and clean energy, with a happy community of farmers on the outskirts of an idyllic city use robots, weather machines, automatic monitoring of crop quality, etcetera to maintain the land. Ironically, the only non-sustainable items are Chobani's own products. They're all in disposable plastic containers, rather than glass, metal, or ceramic.
- Voiceover Letter: The grandmother's letter to her granddaughter Alice, which is seen attached to the fridge at the end of the short, is read as a voiceover.
- Weather-Control Machine: The woman uses a machine to create rain clouds for her crops.
