A bunch of years ago people got up in arms when Dirt Devil used footage of Fred Astaire dancing to sell vacuums. We're past that now; we live in a highly corporatized, pro-advertising world. We stopped questioning what was being sold to us and now simply ask if it's entertaining enough. Product placement no longer raises an eyebrow, and the assumption is that everything - even our investigative journalism - is sponsored by some product or another.
Which maybe why it took two days for this Galaxy chocolate commercial to come across my transom. Nobody minds that Audrey Hepburn has been digitally raised from the grave to hawk candy; all anybody cares about is whether the CGI version of Audrey looks good. Can we convincingly get other dead stars to sell us products?
The CG Audrey doesn't look quite right; there's still something slightly off about her. She's too smooth, too toon-y to my eyes. I'm pretty sure they just slapped her face on a real woman's head, but it's the face that matters. And her eyes - when eyes are the hardest thing for CG to get right, why animate a woman known for her gorgeous eyes?
It seems sad to me that when someone is dead they can still be used in this way, to promote a product that has no relation to their life's work at all. Death is sometimes the best thing for an artist, allowing their work to be judged as a whole, as a completed canon. But now not even death keeps them from taking one more gig.