N.Y.C.’s ROOF Studio partnered with Le Truc, the creative collective within Publicis Groupe, alongside The Condé Nast Creative Marketing Team and Human, to create an animated film celebrating the 100th anniversary of The New Yorker. Encapsulating the magazine’s unrelenting insights and perspectives on literature, art, culture and current events, the film turns the pages of history, one iconic cover at a time, presenting a sweeping portrait of The New Yorker’s ineffable stamp on the world.
The 60-second film was produced as part of a broader campaign, which includes 30-second and 15-second deliverables and social media cutdowns.
“It was a surreal honor to work on this project,” said Guto Terni, ROOF Studio Co-Founder and the film’s director. “We’re talking about 100 years of a weekly magazine that hasn’t just reported on history — it has helped shape it. Each cover is a time capsule, and watching them in a sequence is like watching history unfold — with art as the lens.”
Ebbing and flowing from one watershed moment to the next, the animations were inspired by a poetic script by The New Yorker and Le Truc, anchored around a “One Hundred Years of…” mnemonic expressing the breadth and universality of The New Yorker stories across every era of the last century. The voiceover carries a tone of intellectual curiosity, subtle irony, and cultural sharpness emblematic of The New Yorker, with each line opening a visual question.
“The script isn’t a single linear story, but a series of reflections on the world from a human lens that make you pause and think, laugh and cry,” explained Terni. “In visually translating these reflections, we chose covers that could echo the tone of each line, adding extra layers of emotion and symbolic stimulus for the viewer.”
To create the film, ROOF sifted through more than 5,000 New Yorker covers, departing from traditional storyboarding techniques with an experimental approach that explored the thematic and tonal connections between each piece of periodical art. The ROOF team played with composition, positioning, scale and transitional devices to imbue the animation with the right dynamism to support the script-based film.
“We had a blast exploring unique ways of pairing the ‘anchor’ covers with the various beats and themes expressed in the script,” added Terni. “With each visual we chose, the emotional match had to be there — and connect to the core of what The New Yorker is.”
ROOF built an internal search tool that tagged each cover with deep metadata — theme, color palette, composition, keywords and historical context. For example, type “triangle” and decades of geometric layouts would appear in seconds. This system enabled the team to organize its findings and match each script beat with the most resonant image.
The project was completed with a whimsically rhythmic arrangement of “Rhapsody in Blue,” produced by music company Human.
“Creating each chapter of this film was a journey in and of itself, and marrying it all together with fluidity and emotional impact was a creatively rewarding process,” said Terni. “The key was staying true to the editorial voice of The New Yorker. It’s a magazine that looks at the world closely, with wit and honesty.”
Win a Funko X Lilo & Stitch Prize Pack!
