Marc & Emma: The Minds behind my Favorite Meme
Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels posing with their most popular character, Stressmannetje.
Question: What is your favorite meme?
Give it a thought…
Do you have an answer on hand yet?
Although the term “meme” can be taken in a broad context, everyone who has a penchant for the internet and uses it on a daily basis has at least one meme they always return to. From fill-in-the-blank templates to clips taken with or without context from a favorite show or film, we all enjoy memes of different forms and backgrounds, just like comfort food. A favorite, well-made meme is like a warm, savory bowl of soup; a comforting source of serotonin that you always come back to.
My personal favorite meme of all time features the star of one of Europe’s most peculiar and recognizable ad campaigns from the last decade. His famous line, “Hier, nen Euro”, and his agonizing screams have graced the internet and captured hearts for over a decade.
Stressmannetje holding up a euro in his most iconic moment in his first commercial, Stress Man.
This is the Stressmannetje (or Little Stress Man or Stress Doll in English), a doll-like puppet man who personifies the stress and frustration felt by car owners and drivers in dreary urban settings. He was the mascot of an ad campaign presented by the Belgium-based public transportation company, De Lijn, in 2012, with the intent of persuading viewers to ditch driving and use public transportation to their advantage.
Before I go into further detail describing this puppet and how I came to love him, I would like to introduce the creators behind the iconic meme. This is the flourishing filmmaking duo known as Marc & Emma.
Emma de Swaef is a dollmaker, puppeteer, and stop-motion animator who was born in Ghent, Belgium in 1985. She attended the LUCA School of Arts, a Flemish art school based in Brussels, Belgium, where she directed and wrote her first short film, Zachte Planten (Soft Plants), in 2008. The live-action/stop-motion hybrid short follows a bored office worker who daydreams about wandering around nude in a strange, dark world with a loyal flock of white sheep, and takes multiple surreal twists and turns with its plot.
Marc James Roels is a film director, photographer, and stop-motion animator who was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1978, and began directing live action shorts in the late 2000’s. In 2012, Marc and Emma got together to create their very first collaboration, the stop-motion animated short, Oh, Willy. Borrowing many motifs and elements from Emma’s Zache Planten, Oh, Willy follows Willy, a middle-aged man who returns to the naturalist, nudist colony he grew up in to visit his dying mother. Willy’s grief, confusion, and remorse are followed by a journey of rediscovery into both the wilderness, and the depths of his unconscious mind. The film’s sets and puppets were crafted almost entirely using colorful wool, which gave the animators a challenge when it came to settling on the film’s aesthetics, visuals, and movement. Although the film’s overall atmosphere is soft and cozy, the narrative’s heavy themes and shocking, psychological imagery (which include breastfeeding, physical illness, and death) seep through the woolen landscapes. This combination seems off-putting at a first glance, but both elements set up a compelling and hauntingly beautiful story.
A beautifully-lit still from the short film, Oh, Willy. Here, the title character lies unconscious on the forest floor, surrounded by woodland creatures.
Oh, Willy received overwhelming, worldwide acclaim at its release, and won over 80 awards, including the prestigious Cartoon d’Or, a prize that celebrates European animation. The short’s success led to Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels becoming their own filmmaking duo named Marc & Emma. The two animators, who are based in Antwerp, Belgium, went on to create more captivating stop-motion films, such as 2018’s grim historical anthology This Delicious Cake, and the first story in Netflix’s three-part dark comedy, The House. The duo also began directing, designing, and animating commercials and television spots for various European brands, which have featured their acclaimed stop-motion, as well as traditional puppetry that mixes its handcrafted charm and appeal into live-action settings. One of the first commercials they designed and animated, Sugarman, was for the Belgian sugar manufacturer Tiense Suiker in 2012. It featured a puppet character constructed out of sugar cubes that befriends a friendly trucker who helps him return to his literal home sweet home. The short was awarded the Bronze Lion at the 2012 Cannes Lions for its brilliant animation and puppetry.
Marc & Emma’s sugarcube-constructed puppet sweetening his trucker friend’s drink at a cafe in the commercial Sugarman.
Marc & Emma are two excellent minds that have spent the last decade refueling and building upon the magic of puppet-based cinema, and are both talented voices in the world of modern stop-motion animation. They both formed a unique, whimsical aesthetic that is easily recognizable for its intricate and detailed sets and props, and their handmade puppet characters, many of which share the same set of sweet characteristics: small and beady eyes, wispy hair, sunken-in mouths, round and smooth heads, curvy body features, and nubby hands and feet.
Unlike other forms of stop-motion such as traditional model animation and claymation, as well as others that utilize soft materials and textiles such as Animagic or Fuzzy-Felt, there is something about Marc & Emma’s woolen stop-motion projects that feels a little more humanistic than usual. One of the most common words that has been used to describe their films is “tender”, which perfectly sums up their short films and adverts. Emma de Swaef’s lovingly-structured and distinctive characters and set designs, Marc James Roels’ artistry from live-action filmmaking, as well as their combined senses of silly humor, wide-range storytelling, and intense screenwriting all play vital roles in creating pieces that form deep connections with audiences and win our hearts.
The main protagonist Mabel and her baby sister Isobel from Marc & Emma’s story from the stop-motion Netflix anthology film, The House. Their piece is titled I- And heard within, a lie is spun.
Let’s return to Marc & Emma’s arguably most famous and recognized project, Stressmannetje.
De Lijn’s Stressmannetje advertising campaign lasted from 2012 to 2014, and featured Emma de Swaef’s beloved puppet character of the same name in two special commercials: Stress Man and Parking Ticket. Both of the shorts star the soft-bodied, child-like Stressmannetje following his matching human counterpart as they face the inconveniences of taking the car in bustling cityscapes. These all lead to a range of hilarious, but absolutely relatable reactions from the high-pitch voiced, Dutch-speaking, hot-blooded puppet (voiced by Bruno Vanden Broecke). Stressmannetje cries and curls up into a ball after his human miserably fails at parallel parking with his cameraless station wagon, yells at and makes scrunched-up, angry faces at the drivers and pedestrians in his path, furiously rips a brand-new parking ticket in half, and, most infamously, lets out a blood-curdling scream after accidentally dropping a €1 coin into a city drain cover. The commercials end with the human literally leaving their stress behind by choosing to travel around the busy city by taking the bus instead; a happy ending unless you are on the side of the emotional, adorable Stressmannetje. The shots of Stressmannetje’s movements were captured using various green screen tricks that added more life to the doll’s presence in his surroundings.
Stressmannetje screaming at a parking ticket in his second commercial, Parking Ticket.
During his advertising campaign, Stressmannetje was immensely popular in the eyes of his Belgian and Flemish target audiences. He appeared in two more commercials: one in which he cries in the backseat of a car like he does in Stress Man as a response to a heartbreaking attack from the television program Volt, and one where he plays in his own free-to-download, “endless running”-style mobile game called Stressmannetje- Het Spel (which had over 335,000 downloads from various devices, and was the #1 free app on both the App Store and Google Play for over two weeks!). He made appearances in other forms of advertising such as radio ads, printed ads, and banners on both the internet, as well as transit vehicles. He also had his own merchandise such as Potver-Pots (which were swear jars to help angry drivers save up money to pay for bus rides), a downloadable GPS voice (coined by Creative Belgium as “the most annoying GPS”), and various dolls based on the puppet from both official and counterfeit sources (many of which appeared in crane game and arcade machines). Stressmannetje’s silly, yet powerful ad campaign had a deep impact on De Lijn, as well as the worlds of Belgium advertising and marketing at the time. It won at the 2015 Effie awards for effectively increasing the number of bus travelers in Belgium by 15.5%!
Eventually, like many beloved characters, Stressmannetje finally retired after his ad campaign came to a close. Because both Marc & Emma, and the commercials’ production agency, Czar, were so attached to the Stressmannetje puppet, Czar commissioned Emma de Swaef to create a replica copy of him for the agency so that she and Marc could hold onto and cherish their original. His departure was shown through a touching farewell photoshoot taken of the replica puppet packing his bag and walking out the door to go live at Czar’s headquarters, which can be found on Emma de Swaef’s Facebook and Tumblr blogs. After everything he faced to encourage us to take the bus instead of the car, he is no longer the personification of stress; he is a sweet, adorable little doll who has left behind a wonderful legacy.
A photo from Stressmannete’s farewell photoshoot on Marc & Emma’s Facebook blog, in which he caresses a preciously tiny teddy bear.
Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels are some of the most powerful forces in the animation industry today. They have a soft and tender aesthetic that brings magic to the screen and submerges us into new, imaginative, and at many times intense worlds. I have fallen in love with the filmmaking duo’s works ever since Stressmannetje became my favorite meme way back when, and I can hardly wait for what new captivating stop-motion or puppet-based projects they might have for us in the future.
A beautiful shot of Marc James Roels and Emma de Swaef working on Oh, Willy.
Sources Referenced/Additional Information:
-Czar