Amstel lager

City life

The visual references to urbanity, rhythm and dance fit in with the broader cultural atmosphere of the early 1960s: popular cinema, musicals and cosmopolitan modernity. You could interpret the image as an advertisement seeking to capitalise on a sense of the new, the sophisticated and the vibrant.

The fact that the bottles almost function as characters is also characteristic of that period: products were given character, movement and a small narrative. Instead of simply ‘here’s the beer’, you see a staged micro-world in which the brand embodies a style.

Trivia

Within the studio, a different genre name was assigned for this type of film: stop motion, to distinguish it from puppet animation, which was thus called ‘animation’. The literal translation of ‘stop motion’ is: bringing movement to a halt. The translation of ‘animation’ is: bringing it to life. Within the studio, staff gave puppet animation a higher rating than stop motion.  

Realise that today such a production is made on the computer and computer effects are used to enlarge and reduce the bottles. Here, the vials are placed and shifted in real sets. An ingenious combination of two- and three-dimensional objects and photographs. This work became an independent speciality because of the many technical skills and often self-developed tricks to achieve the desired effect. In the process, craftsmanship came into its own because you could never see in advance how the final result would be until the film was shot and developed in the film laboratory. After all, video assistants or computers did not exist. Everything was shot analogue. Within this film, we conveniently worked with pre-animated vials, which were then printed and cut out. These could be shot on a background with a drawn perspective. This offered the possibility, for example, of bottles tumbling or flying away. Other shots were shot in a real set. 
It is therefore unfortunate that no credits have survived from productions like this one.
Happily, it is not known who was the composer of this production.