Watch Honda’s Engine Tech Evolve in This Stop Motion Clip

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Watch Honda’s Engine Tech Evolve in This Stop Motion Clip

The company used paper and stop motion to illustrate its history of engineering.

In Honda's new ad, the Japanese multinational corporation turned to a pretty vintage medium to chart the evolution of its engine tech over the decades: paper.

Watch as a retro ex-military radio generator is turned into a bicycle engine, which shapeshifts into a motorcycle, high-speed F1 car, then into newer inventions such as the Asimo robot.

The spot took four months to create and saw Honda teaming up with a team of animators and illustrators from the stop motion studio PES. To produce the spot, the creators produced thousands of original drawings—depicting Honda's engine tech transformations—before stringing each scene to the next with their hands one frame at a time.

While this is still a commercial ad and an ode to a manufacturing giant, it's still pretty cool to see the timeframe in which engineers morphed ex-military radio generators into the robots and aerospace tech of the present.

Cool Japan is a column about the quirky and serious happenings in the Japanese scientific, technological and cultural realms. It covers the unknown, the mainstream, and the otherwise interesting developments in Japan.