ARCHIVEHow Happiness Brussels Turned YouTube's First Video Into an Elephant Elegy
"Us Still at the Zoo" is a 2025 documentary-style film campaign created by Happiness Brussels for World Animal Protection, published in Belgium, the United Kingdom, and the United States in April 2025, that uses archival footage and AI-generated visuals to retell the story of Sumithi, an Asian elephant who died after 48 years in captivity, through the lens of YouTube's first-ever uploaded video, according to Prnewswire.
The campaign launched on April 23, 2025, a date chosen deliberately to coincide with the 20th anniversary of YouTube's inaugural upload, the 19-second clip titled "Me at the zoo" posted by co-founder Jawed Karim, according to Little Black Book. That original video, filmed at the San Diego Zoo, became the cultural anchor for "Us Still at the Zoo," which inverts the cheerful human perspective of the source material to place the camera — and the emotional weight — with the elephant. The campaign's title is a direct linguistic echo of Karim's original, shifting possession from the human visitor to the animal on permanent display.
World Animal Protection, a global animal-welfare NGO, commissioned the work to advance its longstanding advocacy against the captivity of wild animals. The campaign was produced in partnership with Bine Studio and AI artist 10-D, and distributed simultaneously across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Belgium, with additional World Animal Protection regions preparing their own distribution rollouts, as reported by PR Newswire, according to Campaignbrief. The concept had been in development for approximately five years before its April 2025 release, according to Happiness Brussels, a timeline that speaks to the deliberate, research-led nature of its construction. Sumithi's story — 48 years confined, never to return to a natural habitat — serves as the campaign's emotional and factual backbone, grounding what could have been abstract advocacy in a single, documentable life.
Happiness Brussels identified a precise cultural moment. The 20th anniversary of YouTube's first upload created a globally recognised hook that required no manufactured premise — the platform's own milestone supplied the context, and the agency's task was to redirect its meaning.
The strategic architecture of the campaign rests on a well-established tension in animal-welfare communication: audiences are more moved by the story of one named individual than by aggregated data about species populations. Sumithi, the Asian elephant at the centre of "Us Still at the Zoo," is not a statistic. She lived for 48 years in captivity, a specific and verifiable fact that transforms the campaign's emotional register from advocacy rhetoric into something closer to biography. By anchoring the film to a real animal with a documented history, Happiness Brussels and World Animal Protection sidestepped the credibility gap that often undermines cause-driven advertising.
In the United Kingdom, the United States, and Belgium — the three primary distribution markets — public awareness of zoo ethics and wild-animal captivity has grown alongside broader conservation discourse. Competing organisations such as the Born Free Foundation and the Humane Society of the United States have long campaigned against captive wildlife, and World Animal Protection operates in a crowded advocacy space where creative differentiation is essential to cut through. The decision to use a cultural artefact as universally recognised as YouTube's first video gave the campaign an entry point that neither Born Free nor the Humane Society has previously occupied, as noted in coverage by LBBOnline. The social-experiment quality of the film — presenting what appears to be casual zoo footage before revealing its deeper subject — reflects a strategic choice to earn attention before demanding it. As reported by Forbes, the campaign generated substantial news coverage across the United States following its launch.
"Us Still at the Zoo" combines two distinct visual registers. Archival footage grounds the film in documentary authenticity, while AI-generated imagery, produced by artist 10-D in collaboration with Bine Studio, extends the visual narrative into sequences that no historical camera could have captured from Sumithi's perspective.
The choice of 10-D as the AI creative partner was deliberate and considered. Diederik Jeangout, Creative at Happiness Brussels, explained the rationale as reported by LBBOnline: "10-D has a traditional filmmaking background yet has already extensive experience in making AI films as well, which made him the perfect partner in keeping the visuals exciting but also within the context of a strong narrative piece." That dual fluency — in conventional cinematography and in AI image generation — prevented the film from becoming a technology demonstration at the expense of emotional storytelling. The AI sequences are deployed in service of narrative, not spectacle.
The tonal calibration of the film was equally intentional. Jeangout noted, as reported by LBBOnline, that "We think we found a voice that really captured the emotion of the story without having to be dramatic or overly emotional at all." This restraint is a significant creative decision in a category — animal welfare — where campaigns frequently rely on distressing imagery to provoke response. "Us Still at the Zoo" operates instead through implication and recontextualisation: the familiar format of a zoo video, stripped of its human-centric framing, becomes quietly devastating. Jeangout described the approach directly, as cited by LBBOnline: "While it appears to be a trivial video of someone enjoying a zoo trip, it is far more than that." The film's deceptive surface simplicity is its primary craft achievement, and the production collaboration between Happiness Brussels, Bine Studio, and 10-D across Belgium, the United Kingdom, and the United States markets was structured to sustain that simplicity under the pressure of a technically complex production process.
ARCHIVENo verified performance data for "Us Still at the Zoo" in the form of view counts, conversion metrics, or fundraising uplift is publicly available at the time of writing. What is documented is the campaign's media reach at launch. As reported by PR Newswire and corroborated by Finance Yahoo, the campaign generated coverage across 457 news outlets in the United States following its April 23, 2025 release — a figure that indicates substantial earned-media penetration for a cause-driven film campaign operating without a conventional paid-media budget comparable to commercial advertisers.
LBBOnline reviewer Iain Akerman described the campaign as "heartfelt" and "genuinely moving" in a May 9, 2025 assessment, a qualitative signal of creative resonance from a trade publication that evaluates work across Belgium, the United Kingdom, and the United States markets simultaneously. The campaign's structural effectiveness rests on three compounding factors: the universality of its cultural reference point, the specificity of its subject, and the restraint of its creative execution. Each element reinforces the others. A campaign built on a lesser-known reference, a generalised animal subject, or an emotionally overwrought tone would forfeit the precise quality that makes this one worth examining.
Clapboard scores "Us Still at the Zoo" at 63 out of 100, reflecting strong conceptual clarity and cultural timing offset by the absence of verifiable campaign-performance data and the inherent difficulty of measuring long-term advocacy impact against a single film asset.
"Us Still at the Zoo" is a 2025 film campaign created by Happiness Brussels for World Animal Protection. It uses archival footage and AI-generated visuals to tell the story of Sumithi, an Asian elephant who spent 48 years in captivity, reframing YouTube's first-ever uploaded video to centre the animal's experience rather than the human visitor's.
April 23, 2025 marked the 20th anniversary of YouTube's first uploaded video, "Me at the zoo." Happiness Brussels chose this date to connect the campaign directly to that cultural milestone, using the anniversary as a globally recognised platform to reframe the original footage through the perspective of a captive elephant named Sumithi.
Sumithi was an Asian elephant who died after 48 years in captivity. World Animal Protection and Happiness Brussels chose her story because a single documented life communicates the reality of captivity more powerfully than aggregate data, grounding the campaign's advocacy in a specific, verifiable biography rather than abstract statistics about wild-animal welfare.
AI artist 10-D, working with Bine Studio, generated visual sequences that extended the film beyond what archival footage alone could provide. According to LBBOnline, Happiness Brussels selected 10-D specifically for a dual background in traditional filmmaking and AI production, ensuring the technology served the narrative rather than overshadowing it.
The campaign published simultaneously in Belgium, the United Kingdom, and the United States in April 2025, as reported by PR Newswire. Additional World Animal Protection regions were preparing their own distribution rollouts at the time of launch, indicating the campaign was structured for broader international reach beyond its three primary markets.
Happiness Brussels spent approximately five years developing the concept before its April 2025 launch. That extended development timeline reflects the research-led nature of the campaign's construction and the complexity of combining archival documentary material with AI-generated imagery in service of World Animal Protection's captive-animal advocacy goals.
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