GREE is really big in Japan (as the saying goes, but also literally). They are a mobile gaming giant over there. So when they launched themselves into the American orbit, they were looking to set themselves apart from the synthetic glut of Farmvilles and Candy Crush Sagas.
The answer was, naturally, puppets. And paper craft. And stop-motion animation.
I worked on the team that concepted this video — and we built each piece that brought the cuddly little aliens into the 3-dimensional world. I even got to show off my latent puppeteering skills inside some of those fuzzy hands.
BRB, adding “puppeteering” to my LinkedIn…