ROOF Studio Animates 100 Years of The New Yorker

Apr. 30, 2025

ROOF Studio (ROOF) partnered with Le Truc, the creative collective within Publicis Groupe, alongside The Conde Nast Creative Marketing Team and Human, to create a captivating animated film celebrating the 100th anniversary of The New Yorker. Encapsulating the magazine’s unrelenting insights and perspectives on literature, art, culture, and current events, the film turns the pages of history, one iconic cover at a time, presenting a sweeping portrait of The New Yorker’s ineffable stamp on the world. 

The :60 film was produced as part of a broader campaign, which includes :30 and :15 deliverables and social media cutdowns. 

ROOF gracefully animated each frame to match the wit, nuance, and artfulness only The New Yorker can offer. Ebbing and flowing from one watershed moment to the next, the sequence seamlessly converges in delightful tapestries and motion. 

Guto Terni, ROOF Studio Co-Founder and Director said:

“It was a surreal honor to work on this project. We’re talking about 100 years of a weekly magazine that hasn’t just reported on history — it has helped shape it. Each cover is a time capsule, and watching them in a sequence is like watching history unfold — with art as the lens.” 

 

The animations were inspired by a poetic script by The New Yorker and Le Truc, anchored around a “One Hundred Years of…”  mnemonic expressing the breadth and universality of The New Yorker stories across every era of the last century. The voiceover carries a tone of intellectual curiosity, subtle irony, and cultural sharpness emblematic of The New Yorker, with each line opening a visual question. 

Terni elaborates:

“The script isn't a single linear story, but a series of reflections on the world from a human lens that make you pause and think, laugh and cry. In visually translating these reflections, we chose covers that could echo the tone of each line, adding extra layers of emotion and symbolic stimulus for the viewer.”

 

ROOF embarked on the film with more than 5,000 New Yorker covers to sort through. Departing from traditional storyboarding, they embraced a more experimental approach to the narrative flow, exploring the thematic and tonal connections between each cover.

Testing different approaches, ROOF played with composition, positioning, scale, and transitional devices to imbue the animation with the right dynamism to support the script-based film.

Terni added:

“We had a blast exploring unique ways of pairing the ‘anchor’ covers with the various beats and themes expressed in the script. With each visual we chose, the emotional match had to be there — and connect to the core of what The New Yorker is.”

 

Beyond the script, the animations delightfully interplay with a whimsically rhythmic arrangement of “Rhapsody in Blue,” produced by music company Human.

Considering the breadth of source material to work with, ROOF built an internal search tool that tagged each cover with deep metadata—theme, color palette, composition, keywords, and historical context. For example, type “triangle” and decades of geometric layouts would appear in seconds. This system enabled the team to organize its findings and match each script beat with the most resonant image.

Terni concluded:

“Creating each chapter of this film was a journey in and of itself, and marrying it all together with fluidity and emotional impact was a creatively rewarding process. The key was staying true to the editorial voice of The New Yorker. It’s a magazine that looks at the world closely, with wit and honesty.”