Mother, Greenpeace and Salon Alpin's new animated short focuses on deforestation, palm oil, and orangutans

Since 1969, Greenpeace has been engaged in a globe-spanning attempt to ensure the ability of the Earth to nurture life in all its diversity. Its latest campaign, which features a Salon Alpin directed video, joins the dots between deforestation, palm oil, and the plight of the orangutan.

The 90-second short – for which noted thespian Emma Thompson has provided the voiceover – Rang-tan: the story of dirty palm oil is a Passion Animation Studios’ produced clip aimed at educating children. Greenpeace itself says it, “aims to raise awareness of rainforest destruction for palm oil and inspire a new wave of activists, helping to influence and change corporate behaviour.”

In terms of visual process, sustainable storytelling studio Salon Alpin tells us that, “we always choose the most efficient technique to make each shot work,” which is no mean feat given that the short clip combines cel-shading, 3D, traditional two-dimensional animation and VR techniques. “The idea was to create a visual language that would appeal to a wide audience and implement it by selecting techniques to make it engaging.”

The team at Salon Alpin describes learning the truth between palm oil production and rapidly increasing deforestation as “shocking” and went on to tell us that it believes “animation has the ability to bring audiences together, young and old, to capture and convey complex and difficult messages.”

John Suaven, executive director for the non-governmental organisation says that despite promises made by companies such as Nestlé, Unilever and Mondelez to “drop dirty palm oil from their products,” by 2020, progress has thus far been “pitiful”.