A red cabriolet races madly over rolling hills. At the wheel is an enormous cat, puffing a cigar. On the back seat three unfortunate little creatures are being relentlessly whipped about.

No Limits, a one-minute animated spot with a sting in the tail, campaigns for a child’s right. The clip was made at the Institute of Animation at the Film Academy in Baden-Württemberg. Students Heidi Wittlinger, Anja Perl and Max Stolzenberg set themselves the task of creating, within three months, a socially-engaged spot that would convey one of the rights included in the “Convention on the Rights of the Child”.

First they collected ideas and then sorted through them. The goal was to develop an original, appealing style which would stand out against the host of other works and thus communicate the message as effectively as possible. They based their work on the conviction that this socially-engaged spot should not bore viewers by lecturing at them (“it’s badly made, but for a good cause”); it should be so entertaining that it carries audiences away and then brings them back to earth with a bump. The filmmakers saw an advantage in presenting their idea in animated form: they would not have to use real children but could design totally fictitious “fantasy figures”. As a consequence the spot is not about children of any specific nationality and due to its symbolic level is universally valid.

The entire spot was computer generated (Maya), but was to look as if it had been drawn manually. To create this impression the many textures were painted by hand and scanned in. While designing the sets and the characters, it was important to deliberately add “imperfections” and asymmetries to neutralize what is often the extremely perfect (and thus often charmless) appearance of computer animations.