SK-II gets animated with #NOCOMPETITION

Following its recent #NOCOMPETITION campaign, beauty brand SK-II has taken things up a notch by launching an animation series called "VS". To be released on 6 April, the series will feature six films based on the real-life experiences of six Olympic athletes that SK-II partnered with for the campaign.

The athletes are American gymnast Simone Biles, Chinese swimmer Liu Xiang, four Japanese athletes - table tennis player Ishikawa Kasumi, badminton duo Ayaka Takahashi and Misaki Matsutomo, surfer Mahina Maeda, and Japan's national volleyball team Hinotori Nippon. 

Each of the six films in VS will explore different facets of competition in beauty that dictate how people should look, act and feel in society's definition of beauty. The facets include trolls, pressure, image obsession, rules, limitations, and machine-like mindset. Each of them will be portrayed in the form of a kaiju (strange beast), which reflects the inner demon each athlete has to face. 

The beauty brand produced a 30-second ad to promote VS, which featured snippets of the different animation films. The ad was uploaded on 4 March, and garnered 40,690 views at the time of writing. SK-II also got Biles to feature the ad in an Instagram post.

To launch its animation series, SK-II recently had a Times Square takeover which featured Biles defeating a troll on the screens. According to a press release, Biles appears as a digital avatar from her film and takes down her kaiju, a "Beauty Troll King" which is made up of actual comments and tweets from beauty trolls about how she looked or behaved in the course of her gymnastic career. The stunt is coupled with news of the launch of VS. Marketing has reached out for additional information.

The #NOCOMPETITION campaign was launched in line with the upcoming Olympic Games Tokyo 2020. Collaborating with top Olympic athletes, SK-II aims to define what beauty means to them. YoeGin Chang, brand director of SK-II Japan said the campaign was done with the aim to call out "toxic competition in beauty that women face every day", in the greatest competition for humanity that is the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020.

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