Michel Gondry is better than his flatulent, sub-Fraggle Rock ad for John Lewis

Eleven years into the John Lewis Christmas Advert era, the time has come to ask if this annual bout of pop-culture gastric flu is being generated by an algorithm.

Every year, the campaign sticks rigidly to formula: a nostalgic and/or sentimental short-form narrative, set to the kind of acoustic cover version of a pop-rock standard you might otherwise expect to hear playing in a hotel lift. 

The 2017 edition, which was unveiled this morning, is no different: a fangless riff on Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are, featuring a plaintively strummed rendition of the Beatles track Golden Slumbers, performed by Elbow.

The two-minute film follows a young boy who’s kept awake at night by a giant, snoring, flatulent monster under his bed, until the monster gives him a nightlight for Christmas – from John Lewis, obviously – and then vanishes, allowing the kid to finally sleep in peace.

Except the ad doesn’t even have the courage to properly get rid of him: at the end, it brings the monster back with a dopey, affectionate grunt from off-screen, derailing the story's emotional arc (kids grow up, wonder fades, but our memories of it make us who we are) with a soggy, baby-rice-like squidge.

What makes the new advert particularly aggrieving is that it was directed by Michel Gondry, the consistently inventive French director behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay) and Be Kind Rewind, as well as countless dazzlingly inventive music videos, perhaps most notably with The White Stripes.

Now, Gondry has not been on a vintage run of form of late: his 2013 romance Mood Indigo was cluttered and overly whimsical, and his far better 2015 coming-of-age road movie Microbe & Gasoline was only released on two screens in the UK, and promptly sunk from sight. Nevertheless: alors, Michel, you’re better than this. 

There is one vintage Gondry flourish. Early on, the monster’s snoring blows a jumble of toys from underneath the bed then sucks them back again, and the movement has a tactile, home-made feel in keeping with the director’s trademark lo-fi visual flourishes.

And I liked the early hints at the monster’s possible imagination-figment status: the fuzzy slippers, the painting on the bedroom wall. But the monster’s obviously digitally enhanced features – the glazed, twitching eyes, the weightless tongue, the nose like a distended testicle – are the opposite of charming, and look less believably alive than Ma and Pa Gorg from Fraggle Rock, let alone the gorgeous recreations of Sendak’s mad menagerie in Spike Jonze’s feature-length adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are from 2009.

Gondry isn’t a mimic or a follower by nature. His films and music videos have a clockwork ingenuity that keeps you constantly puzzling over what you’ve just seen and how on earth it was achieved, a little like the more elaborate set-pieces of Jacques Tati, or perhaps a Hobbycraft version of Derren Brown, working with four-dimensional pipe-cleaners and fuzzy felt.

But the John Lewis Christmas Advert has defeated him – just as it continues to defeat me as a viewer, year in, year out.