The first sunrise of a new year - of ‘Hatsuhinode’ in Japanese - is a profoundly significant moment in Japanese culture, when people from all over Japan travel to watch the first sunrise of the year from Mount Fuji. This is something that Amazon Japan wanted to acknowledge in this New Year Sale campaign, paying tribute to this wholesome and hopeful event. The key objective here was to create music that is locally authentic, to accompany the Japanese imagery in the animation (Sake, Mochi, Mt Fuji). The aim was to create a composition that was completely unique and original, whilst being familiar to a Japanese audience, encouraging a sense of sustained reflection among viewers.

This warm and casual campaign animates Amazon boxes into lovable, human-like characters, giving a hopeful glimpse to the year ahead with the digital clock showing the time of the sunrise on January 1st 2021. Characters are shuffled along a fictional conveyer-belt, surrounded by a landscape of traditionally Japanese objects. The story finishes with the sun rising over mount Fuji, and a family of Amazon boxes enjoying the spectacle together, as an underscore of casual and rhythmic music plays.

As the animation features Amazon delivery boxes heavily in its imagery, we had an idea to use the Amazon boxes themselves as percussion for our composition. With drums and percussion very much part of Japan’s musical heritage, the strategy was to bring the sound of Amazon to life - quite literally - by turning its merchandise into instruments. Amazon’s iconic ‘smile’ logo is brought to life by animation in this campaign, and we wanted to echo that by using whistling in our music. By bringing the boxes to life through music and sound, we hoped to enhance the humanity of the characters in the animation.

In order to capture a wide range of tones and timbres, we gathered an assortment of different sizes of Amazon boxes, a variety of mallets and sticks, and travelled to the newly built ESR logistics warehouse in Amagasaki, one of the largest warehouses in the world and a key Amazon partner. As the warehouse was still partially incomplete at the time, we were able to record in an enormous space, with great natural reverb to give a sense of scale and significance. As authenticity was key to this campaign, recording in a live, open space rooted this magical campaign with genuine, organic ambiance while still embodying whimsy and hope. Everything from the sound of Sake bottles to cardboard boxes was created naturally using the sounds themselves.

An important consideration of this campaign was local authenticity, creating something that both resonated with a Japanese audience and held a unique and fresh space. Across the campaign, feedback from the client and audience alike was incredibly positive, acknowledging a nuanced combination of cultural significance and contemporary flair. We have welcomed positive feedback not only from a local audience, but from the international marketing community outside of Japan, and are proud of this musical tribute to Japan’s musical heritage.