NTT DOCOMO | XYLOPHONE (森の木琴) | 2011
A wooden ball rolls down a hill, and the world holds its breath / NTT DOCOMO "XYLOPHONE"
44 meters long, built on a forest slope. A giant wooden xylophone playing Bach's Cantata No. 147. No CGI, no sound added afterward, just wooden balls rolling down and down. And yet people all over the world held their breath watching it. This is what simple really means.
The problem
In 2011, NTT DOCOMO launched a phone called the "TOUCH WOOD SH-08C," made using thinned wood. Its body used domestic cypress, making it an environmentally conscious product. But at the time in Japan, there was a strong misconception that cutting trees meant destroying nature, and many people didn't understand why forest thinning was actually necessary. The challenge was how to convey the goodness of forests and wood—not by listing specs, but by delivering the appeal of wood itself as an experience.
The insight
If you want to talk about a phone made of wood, why not express it through something else made of wood? From that simple idea, creative director Morihiro Harano arrived at the concept of setting up a giant xylophone in a forest and having it play music. The first design was apparently as complicated as a Rube Goldberg machine, packed with gimmicks. But Harano stripped it all away and narrowed the vision down to a single straight line through the forest. Not complexity, but stillness. That decision is what gave the piece its unique sense of mystery and story.
The idea
On Mount Kosho in Kama City, Fukuoka Prefecture, the team built a 44-meter-long xylophone with 413 keys, entirely by hand. All the material was thinned wood. The staff camped in the forest for a week while assembling it. The music was Bach's Cantata No. 147. Faster pieces were considered at first, but given the xylophone's structure, they realized a piece with evenly spaced notes would work best, so they chose Bach. Thanks to the skills of wood engineer Saburo Tsuda, sound designer Kenjiro Matsuo, and the carpenters on site, the finished xylophone ended up more precise than the blueprints, and visually beautiful besides. The slope the balls roll down sits at a 12-degree angle. It took three months to find this "perfect angle." The final shot, where the ball comes to a stop right beside the phone, reportedly only worked on the 49th take. No CGI, no sound added afterward—just the real sound, recorded live, 100 percent.
What happened
The film was finished on March 10, 2011. The next day, the Great East Japan Earthquake struck. The client was forced to cancel the campaign entirely, but the film, which had been uploaded to the website, spread around the world through Facebook on its own. On March 31, right after the disaster, a blog editor at The New York Times Magazine spotted it and wrote about it. From there, it exploded in popularity both in Japan and abroad. Fast Company described it as "a film that stopped people in their tracks in a web buried under cat videos and snark." At Cannes Lions 2011, it won Gold in the Cyber and Film Craft categories and Silver in the Film category. It also swept numerous international advertising awards, including at Spikes Asia and ADFEST. Its YouTube view count has passed 15 million and keeps climbing.
Afterthought
Harano has said that forces beyond the production team's control ended up giving the work a different meaning. The sound of water in the background, the timing with the earthquake—all of it was coincidence, but that coincidence is what made the work so special. Skill, passion, and fate. When those things come together, advertising becomes something more than advertising. It really makes you think. And honestly, it makes you want to go visit a forest too.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2011
