Diesel's Kinky, Quirky Japanese Film Is About Breaking Down Barriers to Love

Diesel's global campaign centers on the idea of "Make Love Not Walls" and debuted with a spot directed by David LaChapelle that showed people in a desert breaking down a barrier of concrete and barbed wire, then celebrating by dancing and making out. The film was an obvious dig at President Donald Trump's vision of a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Japan is Diesel's biggest market, and the brand wanted to make sure its message resonated there as well, so it shot a localized take on the campaign in Tokyo with Geometry Global Japan. The walls in the Japanese film are mostly figurative; they're barriers that keep people from falling in love. The ad features three characters the agency calls "love warriors," denim-clad cupids who nudge couples to get together. The ad culminates in a pulsating, kinky montage of phallic and yonic symbols, tongues, ripe fruit and copulating plastic wind-up dolls. Like LaChapelle's film, the Japanese ad shows same-sex couples kissing, which is unusual for a Japanese ad, although unlike the previous film there is little ethnic diversity. The agency points out that the film was shot in Tokyo's Shibuya District, the first in the country to recognize same-sex partnerships.

Diesel's Kinky, Quirky Japanese Film Is About Breaking Down Barriers to Love

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