This little clip has probably been spreading around long enough for some of you to have seen it. My friends and I are wondering though… is it CG?
I mean, the rolling cog in the beginning looks a bit on the claymation side, but the rest of the video looks completely spotless (though… it could be that it’s a compressed movie file).
The wheels moving up the incline, I could understand, because they could be weighted… but… it’s all too… perfectly done.
The inspiration seems to be a short film called “The Way Things Go” from 1987. Here’s a Quicktime clip from that piece. That is definitely not CGI, and is just as intricate.
It has to be CG, most of the things that happen… ex the muffler rolling… dont happen in real life due to… oh… say… gravity 
it IS too perfect to be real.
Of course its CG !
Or at least its CG enhanced.
Some of the events are just nuts, like the wheels rolling up the slope (even if weighted) and the exhaust rolling that many times.
No way !
I’ve never seen that spot before, it’s pretty sweet!
It could be straight object animation, I’d have to see it in full resolution to say definitively. Most likely it’s a mix of straight animation and CG. For me, the thing that points most to it being CG is the immense length of the room it takes place in!
Both this spot and “The Way Things Go” are examples of
Rube Goldberg machines (here’s an example).
I agree- this is at least CG enhanced. Some of the elements, as other posters have noted, defy the laws of physics. Even if most of the elements are real objects, I suspect that individual parts of the scene were filmed separately, with computer controlled cameras, and then stitched together with CG- this would explain the seemingly enormous room length that threephi noticed. This stitching would be akin to that in the scene in Notting Hill where Hugh Grant walks through four seasons in the space of a couple of hundred yards- separate shots were blended together by morphing the joins in CG.
I’ve just run across a link that points to a few news stories, that claim the spot was filmed in straight live action, requiring 606 takes and four days to get right.
http://home.attbi.com/~bernhard36/honda-ad.html
The trick with the tires rolling uphill was apparently achieved by carefully weighting the tires on the inside, and balancing them just so.
One of the news items cited in the link above, however, states that one bit of CG splicing was used (when the muffler rolls across the floor) because, as I guessed (;)) they couldn’t fit the stunt in the studio and had to do it in two pieces. The other stories, however, make no mention of this and claim it was 100% uncut live action, meticulously and painstakingly set up and executed.
Still it’s a pretty awesome spot. It was produced for the UK and world market, which is a separate account from the US market, so apparently at present there are no plans to air it stateside.
Here’s the official UK Honda site that has more behind the scenes stuff on the making of the spot: