Over the last decade or so, the John Lewis Christmas Advert has become as important a festive tradition as the King's Speech, someone dying horribly on EastEnders, or eating so many pigs in blankets that you can't even reach for the TV remote until New Year's Eve. Perhaps that last one is just me. But naturally, everyone was very excited when the 2024 John Lewis advert – titled The Gifting Hour – debuted on YouTube this morning.
The advert follows a fairly simple, albeit fantastical story. A woman walks into a John Lewis store to find a present for her sister only to disappear into a montage of events from her life with her sibling, both good and bad. By the end, she meets her sister in the present day and has managed to find the perfect gift. Such is the inherent magic of John Lewis, presumably.
If that struck you as a little undramatic, you're not the only one. No old dude on the moon? No fire-breathing dragon? Not even a dog on a trampoline? As Stuart Heritage put it in a great piece over at The Guardian: "This year, John Lewis has committed the unforgivable sin of literally setting its Christmas advert inside an actual branch of John Lewis."
This feels like it might be the beginning of the end for the John Lewis Christmas advert as a dominant cultural force. Other big-hitters have moved into the frame in recent years, waving their chequebooks at big pop culture figures. This year's Sainsbury's campaign is fronted by none other than The BFG, for example, while Marks & Spencer used Paddington Bear in 2017 and Asda leveraged the ubiquity of Will Ferrell's performance in Elf in 2022. John Lewis has always been a big fish, but now the pond is becoming bigger to meet it.
Perhaps the ideas machine has simply run dry. The formula of "child/lonely adult connects with anthropomorphic creature" reached something of a nadir last year with its tale of a child befriending a ravenous Venus flytrap. Before that, though, 2022’s advert gave us a genuinely lovely story about adoption. Keeping it simple worked on that occasion.
Certainly, we’re now a long way from the peak of the John Lewis format, which was undoubtedly 2013’s stone-cold classic The Bear and the Hare. Rendered in absolutely gorgeous 2D animation and soundtracked to Lily Allen’s beautiful cover of Somewhere Only We Know, it really raised the bar for how inventive festive TV adverts can be as an art form.
More than a decade later, the rising tide has lifted other ships and John Lewis has been left looking a little tired. Their most reliable director, Dougal Wilson, has been poached to direct Paddington in Peru. So the answer is to take the pressure off and just have some fun. Coca-Cola is one of the biggest companies in the world and they’ve been using essentially the same Christmas advert since humanity first evolved to walk on two legs.
But the genie is now very much out of the bottle. John Lewis is like the Marvel Cinematic Universe of festive filmmaking, doomed to permanently high expectations despite diminishing returns. There’s a thought, though. Next year’s John Lewis Christmas advert should feature Spider-Man determined to find the perfect gift for MJ, only to keep getting distracted by people in need of rescue. Set it to a whispery cover of Holding Out for a Hero and you’re sorted.
That’s it; Christmas is saved… all thanks to the magic of John Lewis, presumably.
0 Comments