Back for the future: Why the creative industries hit rewind to tell new stories

While Oasis fills stadiums with moist-eyed fiftysomethings, bald patches hidden under bucket hats, Gaviscon rather than whizz hidden somewhere in their overly tight parkas, millennials are craning their heads away from their phones to see what it was really all about. 

And what it is really, really all about is nostalgia, that great driver of age and ageing, of remembrance of good things that have past. You’ve not lived life long enough if you lack the phantom limb of nostalgia. And there’s nothing quite as sweet as the nostalgia for times you never lived through – the way Gens Z or A crank up the allures of a past that ended before they were born in silky, sheeny social media clips hailing you from a hazy, AI-created Seventies. 

Nostalgia can create better work because it’s anchored in shared emotion, an instant connection, before a word of dialogue is spoken.

At times, the way ahead looks like a rolling screen of good times that are all behind us, while ahead looms an AI apocalypse, climate emergencies and financial collapse. Hell, what’s the odds on a zombie gull holocaust descending upon the seaside town of your childhood? You haven’t visited in year but, oh, the nostalgia. 

Above: English rock band Oasis playing at their live reunion tour in 2025.  

In advertising, time is to be played with as much as valued. And playing with things of the past is having a moment, with the likes of McDonald’s turning to Teletext for its 2023 spot, Change a Little, Change a Lot, or Miss Sydney Sweeney going all seventies retro with her American Eagle denim ad that hit headlines and added cleavage and some old fashioned wordplay to the culture wars. 

When everyone on set knows the feeling you’re chasing, the work comes alive.

Add in multiple film revivals – if it’s not a sequel it’s a reboot – ranging from a new, less mean Mean Girls to a brand new first outing for Superman. Meanwhile, a new generation of creatives with sci-fi levels of tech at their fingertips are looking a more hand made ways of doing things.  

Above: Sydney Sweeney goes all seventies retro with her American Eagle denim ad. 

Will&Sej are a young duo working out of Sydney, under the moniker Haven’t You Done Well Productions, and their brilliantly old-world body horror spot for Slather, The Sun is Not Your Friend, mixes up gamer lore with 2D animation, death laser eyes and the kind of distressed – and distressing – body horror make-up you might find in an eighties video nasty. Which makes sense, stemming as it does from their love of vintage horror. Open the same vein and revel in the splatter of their award-winning short, Sweet Juices, dripping with vintage gooey-ness in a tale about a Chinese takeaway becoming a foodie city’s prime currency. 

There’s the romance, of a pre-data era where film-makers followed emotion, not metrics. Today, so much creativity is analytics-driven it feels soulless. 

“Nostalgia can create better work because it’s anchored in shared emotion, an instant connection, before a word of dialogue is spoken,” they say. “That same emotion motivates the crew. When everyone on set knows the feeling you’re chasing, the work comes alive and people push harder for it. Nostalgia gives you the charge, as a director, and you shape it into something new.”  

Above: McDonald’s uses Teletext in its retro 2023 spot, Change a Little, Change a Lot. 

While the latest AI tech focuses solely on results, creatives like Wil & Sej are as devoted to the old-fashioned process of human creativity that shapes and refines those results. “Everyone is bored to tears with AI slop because it’s easy,” they say. “Human struggle will always be a tear-jerker. The statue of David, carved by hand, is awe-inspiring; 3D-printed, it’s meh. It’s the attempt to be different from AI that will create fascinating work. It will redefine what ‘authentic’ looks like, and in that space I think we’ll see some truly bizarre, unclassifiable pieces of art. This is what excites us, creating a new cinematic grammar.”

It’s coming from a very young generation. It’s not like an old fart like me being nostalgic. It makes nostalgia a different kind of imaginative force.

The lure of the past, that other country where everything is done differently, is a creative spur for the duo. “There’s the romance, of a pre-data era where film-makers followed emotion, not metrics. Today, so much creativity is analytics-driven it feels soulless. Right now,” they add, “we have a huge crush on 80s and 90s Hong Kong cinema. John Woo, Corey Yuen, Wong Jing, films like Hard Boiled. That shit is pure human ingenuity under constraint. No algorithm, just gut feeling and adrenaline.” 

Above: Will&Sej's vintage-horror-inspired spot mixes up gamer lore with 2D animation and the kind of body horror make-up you'd find in an eighties video nasty. 

Turning to the work and ethos of the past can clear the way for creatives to shape what’s to come, too. “Nostalgia is an important drive, and it connects to the whole AI thing, which is the opposite of nostalgic,” says Hornet co-founder Michael Feder. “It’s the moment of the future. Nostalgia always reminds me of early romance. We have one director who does great CG work, Sam Mason, and he brings a real sense of nostalgic romance and a style from a different time. And now he’s doing a holiday campaign for one of the largest cosmetics brand, based on those romantic, nostalgic films.” 

Every few years it feels like there’s an existential threat to the industry, and then, if anything, stop-motion seems to get more popular and stronger.

Feder points, too, to the nostalgia the young can have for an era in which they weren’t even alive, citing the Brisk campaign all over TikTok, with rapper Doja Cat’s decidedly old-school animated self. “People are definitely attracted to it,” he says of the very human ways we reimagine a past we never knew. “And it’s coming from a very young generation. It’s not like an old fart like me being nostalgic. It makes nostalgia a different kind of imaginative force.” 

While Steve Smith at animation studio Beakus is steeped in contemporary techniques, he feels the powerful draw of nostalgia across the medium, especially as an antidote to the increasingly strong hold tech has, as a creative tool and a creative solution that almost, but not quite, has taken hold of itself and turned automaton. In the animation space especially, nostalgia for ‘the old days’ and the old ways of doing things, looks set to survive the year-zero reset of generative AI. 

Above: Younger generations can have nostalgia for a time they weren't even alive, such as the TikTok-famous Brisk campaign with rapper featuring Doja Cat’s decidedly old-school animated self. 

If you want a demonstration of the pull of nostalgia, just look at the success of those behind-the-scenes Aardman Animations videos, he says. “They’re just as popular as the movie itself, people love to see it. They cannot believe that amount of effort has gone into a few seconds. It’s a literal definition of animation, making life and breathing life into something inanimate, and that moves like a human. Even I’m astounded by that, and the craft of it. That’s never gone away and there is no reason why it will.” 

Aardman is incredibly nostalgic, because so many of the projects have a heart or stem from early work Aardman created. 

Aardman’s Will Becher agrees. “We still use the same one old-school techniques, but every few years it feels like there’s an existential threat to the industry, and then, if anything, stop-motion seems to get more popular and stronger, with more people wanting to do it.” 

For Smith at Beakus, it comes down to that human touch disturbing the sleek, smoothness AI serves up. “People say they can always tell the difference, because it is so smooth; every single frame’s been rendered. It’s not easy to tell an AI to skip a frame, and that’s happening in stop-motion, where you take out a couple of frames to get this slightly more living, feeling image, rather than the uncanny valley of smooth.” 

Above: The success of Aardman's behind-the-scenes films demonstrate the appeal of nostalgia and traditional, hand-made animation. 

When Aardman moved into feature film work with Chicken Run there was a lot of focus on ensuring it wouldn’t look too ‘rough around the edges’. Head honchos Nick Park and Peter Lord spent a lot of time ensuring it looked smooth, until they realised they’d gone too far. “Since then, we’ve been working backwards, and on Early Man, Nick Park really wanted to have fur of clay that you could see moving around when it wasn’t meant to be. It was a deliberate embrace of something you cannot control. And it’s an aesthetic that is appealing to a lot of people. It’s the human error that goes in to making art that gives the art its value.” 

If you sit down and watch Snow White, whoah, it’s really clear, the storytelling and characters, its so focused. It’s like Miyazaki. It’s the craft.

Nostalgia, Becher believes, is intrinsic to creative renewal. “Aardman is incredibly nostalgic, because so many of the projects have a heart or stem from early work Aardman created. We have new audiences coming to those, but we also have generations of people before them, from grandparents to toddlers, all watching the same thing. A lot of it is nostalgic, and nostalgia is really important, but it can only work if you originate, so it needs to be a mix. We don’t want to repeat what we’ve done before. We’re always striving to create something new, even if we are tapping in to the films of Alfred Hitchcock or the work of the great animators of the past.”  

Above: Blinkink director Nicos Livesey's mixed-media work demonstrates how nostalgia can be used successfully to underpin new waves of culture.  

For BLINKINK EP Bart Yates, folding nostalgia into the new is like kneading dough to bring out the gluten that make it rise and attain the light, airy texture of a good loaf. “Culture recycles all the time,” he says. “That sense of nostalgia underpinning new waves of culture – that is part of the recycling process. A lot of our best directors, like Nicos Livesey [director of brilliant pieces of the brilliant Women’s Euros Names Will be Made and Britbox’s See it Differently], have a knack of being one foot in the past and one foot in the future.  

If you lean too hard on the past, it can feel indulgent. The trick is to let nostalgia set the stage but then tell a story that feels unexpected, fresh, and relevant today.

“The temptation in purely digital animation,” says Yates, “is you keep adding layers and layers of complexity trying to polish it into being perfect, but instead things get muddy and incomprehensible. But if you sit down and watch Snow White, whoah, it’s really clear, the storytelling and characters, its so focused. It’s like Miyazaki. It’s the craft. In the back of your mind you’re thinking, someone painted that.”  

Above: Britbox’s See it Differently was a masterclass in traditional production craftsmanship.

The pull of nostalgia in the 2020s is perhaps a spiritual extension of the human hand pulling back from the impenetrable, pervasive flood of machine-made hi-jinx that looks less and less real. Pushing against the tide, creative directors at Wieden+Kennedy London Alexandra Sattlecker and David Colman took a hand-break turn approach to creating the retro Seventies feel of a slew of new spots for the newly resurrected, all-electric Ford Capri. 

The three Mischief Rewired spots, helmed by Fredrik Bond, begin with an original 1970s advert for the Capri, complete with original voice-over, that morphs into the new electric Capri, and a whole lot of CGI panthers to replace the real one that slunk around the car back in 1976. A second set of spots, How to Capri, goes full-on The Professionals, right down to the scuzzy 1970s backdrop of urban decay, and a ‘tached ‘tec rolling across the front bonnet a la Bodie and Doyle.  

We live in a world where people can summon almost anything instantly, so when you offer something that feels physical, aged, or imperfect, it’s oddly compelling.

“Nostalgia can be a brilliant creative device,” says David Colman. “It’s not just a warm, fuzzy reference point, but as a strategic way to reframe the present. It gives you a shorthand for emotion, tone, and even character. But if you lean too hard on the past, it can feel indulgent. The trick is to let nostalgia set the stage but then tell a story that feels unexpected, fresh, and relevant today.”  

“If done right it can speak to different generations,” agrees Alex Sattlecker. “Those who grew up with it and those who didn’t but whose curiosity is sparked through the story you’re telling. It can be really powerful.”  

For the Capri campaign, nostalgia was a Trojan horse, wheeling in the new under the old-time swagger of the old, while leveraging a rich iconography of 1970s cop shows, even going so far as to reproduce the editing, title sequences, voice-overs and film quality of that era.