13 Corporate Animation Examples to Learn From

Animation is not a fallback for brands that cannot afford a film crew. It is a deliberate choice that does things live action cannot: it can make an abstract idea visible, soften a heavy subject, or carry a story with pure feeling and no dialogue at all. The thirteen corporate animations below use it on purpose, each embedded so you can watch it in full. After each, I have named the reason animation was the right call.

If there is a lesson threaded through them, it is that the best corporate animation is never decoration. The style is doing a job the story could not do any other way.

The thirteen, and why animation was the right call

Chipotle, “Back to the Start”

A wordless stop-motion parable takes a farmer from a family farm into an industrial factory and back again, carrying a heavy message about food systems with warmth instead of a lecture. Why animation: it made a potentially preachy subject charming. Stop-motion’s handmade softness let Chipotle argue a position without ever sounding like it was arguing.

Oreo, “Wonderfilled Anthem”

A ninety-second animated anthem imagines what would happen if you offered an Oreo to the Big Bad Wolf, Dracula, and a shark. It reframes a cookie from product shots to pure storytelling. Why animation: it let the impossible happen cheaply and charmingly. You cannot shoot a softened shark, but animation makes whimsy the whole point.

Slack, “Work, Simplified”

Hand-crafted character animation dramatises workplace chaos, email overload, meetings, alerts, then resolves it visually into Slack’s calm. The abstract mess of modern work becomes something you can see. Why animation: it visualised an intangible feeling. Overwhelm has no literal image, so animation invents one and then cures it on screen.

Airbnb, “Wall & Chain”

A true customer story, a former Berlin Wall guard hosted decades later by his counterpart from the other side, told as a painterly animated short. Why animation: it let a story with no surviving footage be told beautifully. Animation can reconstruct a memory that a camera could never have captured.

McDonald’s, “WcDonald’s”

A fully animated brand film made with Studio Pierrot, the anime studio behind Naruto and Bleach, leaning into the affectionate “WcDonald’s” spelling from decades of anime. Why animation: the style was the strategy. Adopting a beloved genre’s exact aesthetic bought instant credibility with the fandom the campaign was courting.

Mailchimp, “All in a Day’s Work”

A dialogue-free animated short from Mailchimp Presents uses character comedy about small-business life, no product pitch anywhere in sight. It is brand-building through pure entertainment. Why animation: it let a software company make a genuine short film. Animation gave Mailchimp a distinctive, ownable visual world that a live-action sketch would not have.

Dropbox, “Creative Freedom”

Dropbox’s first brand campaign stitches original mixed-media work from more than a hundred collaborators into one film, embodying the creativity the product is meant to support. Why animation: the medium was the message. A film about enabling creators, made by a crowd of creators in wildly different styles, proves the point by existing.

Google, “Georges Méliès Doodle”

Google’s first VR animated Doodle honours filmmaker Georges Méliès, turning a logo gimmick into a genuine animated short with real craft and story. Why animation: it elevated a marketing unit into art. Animation let a throwaway brand moment become something people sought out and shared for its own sake.

Coca-Cola, “Happiness Factory”

Drop a coin into a Coke machine and the ad follows it inside, into a bustling fantasy world of little creatures who chill, cap, and bottle your drink by hand, the launch film for the Coke Side of Life campaign. Why animation: it built a world that does not exist. The whole premise is what happens inside the machine, a place no camera could ever reach, so animation was not a style choice, it was the only way to show the idea at all.

Honda, “Paper”

A two-minute film that flips through around three thousand hand-drawn paper illustrations to tell seventy years of Honda’s history, every frame made in camera by the artist PES. Why animation: it turned a corporate timeline into something you actually watch. Drawing the history as one unbroken, morphing line does what a montage of archive photos never could, and the fact that a person made every frame by hand is itself the point about craft.

Nike, “The Last Game”

A five-minute animated film where the world’s best footballers, drawn as cartoon versions of themselves, come out of retirement to beat a squad of risk-free clones built by a villain called the Scientist. Why animation: it put real stars in a story you could never shoot. Animation let Nike cast a dozen global players in a full plot with no schedules, no injuries, and no aging, and make them cartoon heroes at the same time.

Samsung, “Do What You Can’t”

A photoreal but entirely computer-generated ostrich stumbles onto a VR headset, dreams of flight, and teaches itself to fly, the spot that became the most awarded campaign at Cannes in 2017. Why animation: it let an ostrich carry a feeling. A bird that looks real but does something no real one can turns “reach past your limits” into a wordless story that stock footage or a person to camera could not.

John Lewis, “Excitable Edgar”

A small dragon keeps accidentally torching the village’s Christmas until a friend finds him a way to be useful, in John Lewis’s first joint festive film with Waitrose. Why animation: it made a destructive character lovable. You cannot cast a real dragon, and a photoreal one would have been frightening, so drawn animation let Edgar be both a fire hazard and adorable at once, which is the entire joke.

What the best corporate animation shares

Across all eight, animation is never chosen by default.

• The style does a job. Each film uses animation to show something live action could not: an abstract feeling, an impossible scene, a lost memory, a specific fandom’s aesthetic.
• Story over product. The strongest corporate animation builds brand through pure storytelling and lets the product stay almost entirely off screen.
• A distinctive, ownable world. Animation gives a company a visual identity competitors cannot easily copy, which compounds over a campaign.
• Feeling carries it. With no need for dialogue or real footage, the best of these run on emotion alone, which travels across languages and platforms.

One from us, and a straight note

At Moonb we make animation and motion as part of our creative work.

I work at Moonb, so treat this as the house view: the corporate animations that land are the ones where a team chose the style to solve a specific storytelling problem, not to decorate a script. That judgment is what a dedicated creative team brings. If you want it, see how Moonb works, and our roundups of motion graphics companies and animated advertisements are good next reads.