Cannes’ Red Carpet Darlings Are Weeping Over France’s Lone Wolf Ad

Olivia Bennett, 12/14/2025Intermarché's poignant ad features a lonely wolf seeking acceptance through a heartfelt gesture: a vegetable stew. Stripped of digital embellishments, this animated tale resonates with universal themes of community and understanding, standing out amidst AI-generated content this holiday season.

This isn’t some mildly uplifting afterthought sandwiched between promos for laundry detergent and fast fashion. “Le mal aimé,” the spot’s original French title, lands with more soul than a year’s worth of algorithm-spun content. Strip the plot to its bones and it’s not far from a fable: a wolf, skulking around the edges, shunned by his woodland neighbors, decides to trade the predator’s growl for something softer. In lieu of teeth, he tries tenderness—specifically, a home-cooked vegetable stew, a fragrant olive branch. Think Andersen’s lonely duckling all grown up, or “Le Petit Prince’s” wide-eyed ache, only recast with fur, yearning, and the faint whiff of mirepoix.

Yet it never descends into finger-wagging or schlocky sentiment. There’s an almost reckless elegance to each frame—scenes brushed like paintings, warmth radiating through winter woods and kitchen pans alike. You can practically feel the animators’ heartbeat in every rippling gesture, as if the whole enterprise were whipped up by artisans with the patience (and eye for detail) of Chanel’s legendary seamstresses. Odd, isn’t it, how a spot lasting barely two minutes can linger longer than a double feature stuffed with VFX?

Anchored to reality by a simple device—live-action bookends showing a child at Christmas, comforted by this oddball legend—the tale pulses with something sharper than nostalgia. Before long, it was everywhere: swooping past a billion impressions, garnering fan art, setting streaming playlists aflutter with the melancholy swing of Claude François crooning “Le mal aimé.” That song—a vintage chestnut dusted off, suddenly relevant again—slides in just as the wolf’s fortunes turn. No surprise, really, that so many wished for a full-length version. Even die-hard genre fans have been known to clutch a tissue.

The creative puppeteers behind it all, at agency Romance, talk craft the way a designer might speak of rare silk. “A transformative arc,” muses creative lead Julien Bon—not so much advertising as alchemy; a chef’s kiss to what has lately been a famine of heartfelt storytelling. Who among us hasn’t nursed the hope of being seen and invited inside, even just for supper? There’s a universal ache here—a longing for community that, come to think of it, rarely survives the first round of edits in corporate boardrooms.

But here’s where Intermarché’s wolf gnaws deeper than any CGI critter or formulaic campaign. Senior copywriter Victor Chevalier flings down the gauntlet: “AI cannot create stories. We create stories.” Hard to argue, watching every flick of the wolf’s ears engineered by hand, each shadow mulled over by animators for months. It’s an old-fashioned defiance, really. Spending patient months on something ephemeral, resisting the siren call of digital shortcuts. Does it matter that it's “just” an ad? Perhaps that’s the punchline—it’s art anyway.

The heart of it all, frankly, isn’t food. Deputy managing director Maïté Orcasberro, with a candor only a French executive could muster, shrugs off the suggestion: “It’s about being understood.” There’s no hidden agenda, no campaign clutter; just a wish that, for once, the wolf gets to set down his burdens and toast marshmallows with the rest of us.

If there’s a surprise ending to be had, it’s the wave of genuine response—comments spilling over in a dozen languages, incomplete sentences, even confessions layered between memes and fan reels. 2025 may be overrun with AI-generated “experiences,” but here’s an ad built neither by algorithm nor market research, but by hands that remember how stories are stitched: gesture by gesture, imperfection by imperfection.

As so many digital holiday campaigns in 2025 flicker and vanish, Intermarché’s solitary wolf keeps stalking the memory: his need for kindness, his risk and reward, the headlong hope of blending in without losing one’s edge. Maybe there’s a lesson stitched in there—tender as new fur. In a festive season awash with spectacle, some of us still hunger for that hand-drawn, slow-cooked magic: an old wolf, a new friend, a bite of belonging.

Sweep aside the pixels and automated platitudes of holiday ad season, and what’s that left gleaming at the bottom of the cinematic stocking? A wolf, alone and yearning, clutching a battered casserole of vegetables. Wildly low-tech, fiercely sincere—and, without so much as a digital snowflake in sight, leaving the world collectively misty-eyed. Perhaps it’s fitting that recently, while towering brands chased AI-generated spectacle as though it were the golden goose, an unassuming French supermarket—Intermarché—quietly delivered the story everyone will actually remember when the credits roll on 2025.This isn’t some mildly uplifting afterthought sandwiched between promos for laundry detergent and fast fashion. “Le mal aimé,” the spot’s original French title, lands with more soul than a year’s worth of algorithm-spun content. Strip the plot to its bones and it’s not far from a fable: a wolf, skulking around the edges, shunned by his woodland neighbors, decides to trade the predator’s growl for something softer. In lieu of teeth, he tries tenderness—specifically, a home-cooked vegetable stew, a fragrant olive branch. Think Andersen’s lonely duckling all grown up, or “Le Petit Prince’s” wide-eyed ache, only recast with fur, yearning, and the faint whiff of mirepoix.Yet it never descends into finger-wagging or schlocky sentiment. There’s an almost reckless elegance to each frame—scenes brushed like paintings, warmth radiating through winter woods and kitchen pans alike. You can practically feel the animators’ heartbeat in every rippling gesture, as if the whole enterprise were whipped up by artisans with the patience (and eye for detail) of Chanel’s legendary seamstresses. Odd, isn’t it, how a spot lasting barely two minutes can linger longer than a double feature stuffed with VFX?Anchored to reality by a simple device—live-action bookends showing a child at Christmas, comforted by this oddball legend—the tale pulses with something sharper than nostalgia. Before long, it was everywhere: swooping past a billion impressions, garnering fan art, setting streaming playlists aflutter with the melancholy swing of Claude François crooning “Le mal aimé.” That song—a vintage chestnut dusted off, suddenly relevant again—slides in just as the wolf’s fortunes turn. No surprise, really, that so many wished for a full-length version. Even die-hard genre fans have been known to clutch a tissue.The creative puppeteers behind it all, at agency Romance, talk craft the way a designer might speak of rare silk. “A transformative arc,” muses creative lead Julien Bon—not so much advertising as alchemy; a chef’s kiss to what has lately been a famine of heartfelt storytelling. Who among us hasn’t nursed the hope of being seen and invited inside, even just for supper? There’s a universal ache here—a longing for community that, come to think of it, rarely survives the first round of edits in corporate boardrooms.But here’s where Intermarché’s wolf gnaws deeper than any CGI critter or formulaic campaign. Senior copywriter Victor Chevalier flings down the gauntlet: “AI cannot create stories. We create stories.” Hard to argue, watching every flick of the wolf’s ears engineered by hand, each shadow mulled over by animators for months. It’s an old-fashioned defiance, really. Spending patient months on something ephemeral, resisting the siren call of digital shortcuts. Does it matter that it's “just” an ad? Perhaps that’s the punchline—it’s art anyway.The heart of it all, frankly, isn’t food. Deputy managing director Maïté Orcasberro, with a candor only a French executive could muster, shrugs off the suggestion: “It’s about being understood.” There’s no hidden agenda, no campaign clutter; just a wish that, for once, the wolf gets to set down his burdens and toast marshmallows with the rest of us.If there’s a surprise ending to be had, it’s the wave of genuine response—comments spilling over in a dozen languages, incomplete sentences, even confessions layered between memes and fan reels. 2025 may be overrun with AI-generated “experiences,” but here’s an ad built neither by algorithm nor market research, but by hands that remember how stories are stitched: gesture by gesture, imperfection by imperfection.As so many digital holiday campaigns in 2025 flicker and vanish, Intermarché’s solitary wolf keeps stalking the memory: his need for kindness, his risk and reward, the headlong hope of blending in without losing one’s edge. Maybe there’s a lesson stitched in there—tender as new fur. In a festive season awash with spectacle, some of us still hunger for that hand-drawn, slow-cooked magic: an old wolf, a new friend, a bite of belonging.