The characters from the Bocchi The Rock anime have recently appeared in a hilarious ad for I LOHAS, a natural water brand under the Coca-Cola group of brands in Japan. The ad follows a story of how the band got a job offer, and how to bring a message of instilling confidence to those who doubt their skills.
This is not the first time Coca-Cola tapped into an existing anime franchise for its campaigns. In January this year, its coffee brand Georgia Coffee worked alongside the 2022 reboot of the Urusei Yatsura series. Other recent anime-themed ads include Blue Lock for the Nissin UFO ramen brand and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners for Nissin’s NEGI-SIO noodle lineup.
The first season of Bocchi the Rock premiered last October and had a total of 12 episodes. It was animated by studio CloverWorks and was directed by Keichiro Saito. The main cast of the anime includes Yoshino Aoyama as Hitori “Bocchi” Goto, Sayumi Suzushiro as Nijika Ijichi, Saku Mizuno as Ryo Yamada, and Ikumi Hasegawa as Ikuyo Kita. Together the four of them make up Kessoku Band. A movie version of the anime was also announced for 2024.
Crunchyroll is streaming the first season of Bocchi the Rock and they describe it as follows:
Hitori Gotoh, “Bocchi-chan,” is a girl who’s so introverted and shy around people that she’d always start her conversations with “Ah…” During her middle school years, she started playing the guitar, wanting to join a band because she thought it could be an opportunity for even someone shy like her to also shine. But because she had no friends, she ended up practicing guitar for six hours every day all by herself. After becoming a skilled guitar player, she uploaded videos of herself playing the guitar to the internet under the name “Guitar Hero” and fantasized about performing at her school’s cultural festival concert. But not only could she not find any bandmates, before she knew it, she was in high school and still wasn’t able to make a single friend! She was really close to becoming a shut-in, but one day, Nijika Ijichi, the drummer in Kessoku Band, reached out to her. And because of that, her everyday life started to change little by little…
