Last week, we shared a rather unusual ad from Ryugin, an Okinawa-based bank whose approach to selling loans involves robots, doe-eyed anime girls and more pink hearts than you can shake a stick at. As it turns out, this same banking corporation has quite the eye for attention-grabbing ads, as we’ve just discovered an older TV spot from the same company, titled Children and Philosophy, which poses a series of mostly abstract questions to a group of elementary school kids.
Responding to questions about everything from love and war to what it means to be free, the kids’ answers are at once refreshing, thought-provoking, and painfully sweet, to the point that we’re starting to wonder if they’re the ones who ought to be in charge of the world. Full video after the jump.
Before we look at the video, let’s take a quick look at some of the questions the video’s makers put to their bright-eyed panel.
Some are fairly straightforward, but to young minds might prove tricky to answer accurately:
▼ “What are children?”
▼ “What are adults?”
▼ “What is money?”
Then there are some seriously abstract questions fired their way which even we might struggle to define:
▼ “Was is happiness?”
▼ “What does is mean to live?”
In many ways, though, we could almost skip the kids’ answers entirely and simply look at the expressions on their faces while they consider the questions. Compare, for example, the look on this little girl’s face when asked to describe war (top) with the one she wears when she talks about love (bottom):
If that doesn’t tell you something about what’s most important in life, I don’t know what will.
Here’s the video in full, complete with English subtitles. It’s OK if you get a little bit blurry-eyed towards the end. I totally didn’t, but you know…
For more videos in this series, along with the original Japanese-only version of the above video, check out Ryugin’s channel on YouTube.
Source/screenshots: YouTube – Ryuginkousiki
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