Animation and humour can play powerful roles in trade justice campaigning. Perhaps the most well known example is the peanut who criticises the regulation of world trade in The Luckiest Nut in the World.  See our page on that film here.

One recent example of this genre was launched In March 2013 in Switzerland. To make public the findings of their report on the sourcing of raw materials by Swiss chocolate manufacturers, Swiss NGO the Berne Declaration (aka Erklärung von Bern) commissioned animators / filmmakers Kompost to imagine what Chocolate Bunnies would do if they knew more about themselves. As Kompost state:

Easter in Switzerland is a busy time for the chocolate industry. Billions of delicious chocolate bunnies are produced by the grand masters of chocolate. Unfortunately, still many Swiss chocolate companies and retailers are producing their chocolate under exploitative conditions; a third even refuse to make a statement to this issue. EvB, a Swiss NGO responsible for fairer globalization, tries to put an end to this with the help of these ads.

The two commercials Kompost designed, directed and animated, show the EvB-chocolate bunny trying to take his life, as he simply cannot live knowing these shocking facts. With the help of a hair dryer and a hotplate, the chocolate bunny tries to melt his sorrows away. His attempts however fail, and he is left with the bitter reality.

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In 2013, you could show your support for this campaign by adding your square of chocolate to this petition bar.

If we could read German (or had more confidence in online translation tools), we’d be making a new chocolate Easter bunny page for followthethings.com. We’d start with Erklärung von Bern‘s facebook page (in which the timeline of the campaign is set out), draw upon sources like this online article and its comments and the comments on YouTube by people who watched these ads there.

If you would like to put together a followthethings.com page on these Bunny ads, the campaign and the discussion they generated (using the standard Descriptions – Inspiration / Process / Technique / Methodology – Discussion / Responses – Outcomes / Impacts – Sources / Furter Reading headings), please get in touch with us via followthethings@yahoo.com.

We are beginning to publish pages in languages other than English, starting with these chocolate pages in English and Finnish. This campaign could be next…

Update

18 April 2013: Erklärung von Bern reported on the successes of this campaign (in German) here.

[Readers may be aware of the Berne Declaration (Erklärung von Bern) as the organisers of the annual Public Eye Awards for the Worst Company of the Year)