Giant Food Falls from Above in IKEA's Warning to Wasteful Christmas Consumers

Nov. 26, 2020

Christmas is often a time of indulgence and extravagance - but that doesn’t mean we should be careless in our behaviour over the holiday season. After we’re done working away in the kitchen and have enjoyed our festive feasts, there’s the temptation to be wasteful - to simply throw away our leftovers as we turn our attention to presents and parlour games. In a bid to encourage a more sensible, considerate approach to Christmas consumption, Ikea Russia has launched a dramatic new spot that shows just what might happen if we carelessly discard our excess food - instead of storing it in plastic containers. 

Directed by Great Guns’ Ilya Naishuller, the festive spot begins with a seemingly typical Christmas scene, as a young boy plays in the snow, surrounded by Christmas trees and fairy lights. As he goes to throw another snowball, however, his attention is drawn to the sky, watching in shock as a giant chunk of pineapple falls from above and crushes a nearby snowman. Suddenly, food begins to fall all over the neighbourhood, as the iconic Christmas song "Carol of the Bells" plays dramatically over the action. We watch as the boy dodges a variety of festive foods, diving through Swiss cheese and evading a tangerine the size of a car. 

When he finally reaches his apartment - which is adorned with a giant bunch of grapes - he discovers his mother carelessly throwing away the leftovers of their Christmas dinner, unaware of the destruction raining down outside. Once she turns to face out the window and realises, however, they decide to pack all their excess food into containers instead - as a voiceover notes that if nature chooses to return everything we’ve thrown away, we should have a holiday without any leftovers. 

Director Ilya Naishuller comments:

“Every holiday season, it is tradition to go all out on cooking festive feasts. This occasionally means we have great gatherings with an overabundance of dishes that end up in the garbage. The idea for this spot was to provoke the viewer to question how much they really need to cook and to look into saving food via IKEA’s affordable plastic containers. The original brief featured a boy hanging out on Christmas Eve and seeing scraps of food and dishes drop out of the sky. After working together with the creatives, we decided to increase the falling food’s proportions so that they were huge, making us feel both wonder and danger. My goal was to combine a sense of adventure (the tangerine clearly a homage to Indiana Jones’ boulder run) and striking visuals to amplify the public service announcement. It’s a wonderful opportunity to be able to make something fun and enjoyable for the viewer that also has potential to make a little bit of a positive change. With the release deadline coming in fast, we didn’t have the time to go the CGI route, so all the otherworldly elements were shot by way of tabletop, which is something I’ve never done before and was a complete blast.”