JibJab

What starts as a surreal underwater birthday animation turns out to be a visual misdirect: the baby has been swimming in the womb the whole time. The reveal lands at birth, turning a familiar “Happy Birthday” message into something much stranger and more memorable.

This ecard was built around Reel 2 Real’s “I Like to Move It,” a song a lot of people now associate with the Madagascar movies. The setup was a packed dance-aerobics class, styled like a loud, sweaty 1980s workout video and filled with personalized characters.

Sweatbands, wristbands, tights, leg warmers, bicycle kicks, and plenty of butt-shaking gave the piece its visual language. The fun was pushing the class-energy as far as possible, turning the whole thing into a chaotic group performance built around movement, rhythm, and exaggerated dance poses.

JibJab licensed Marshmello and Bastille’s “Happier,” but the original song is much more bittersweet than the title suggests. It’s really about letting someone go, so I edited the track down to focus on the brighter, more uplifting moments and reshape it into something that worked for a celebratory ecard.

That new edit gave me room to build a colorful, upbeat story around friendship and actually being happy together. The visuals followed that lighter tone, turning a song with a painful message into something playful, warm, and much more suited to the kind of experience people come to JibJab to share.

A brief tribute to one of pet ownership’s harsher realities: your cat may live with you, but that doesn’t mean it loves you. The ecard runs through familiar feline offenses like knocking things off counters, coughing up hairballs, and plotting to eat the family fish.

I leaned into those everyday cat-owner frustrations and pushed them just far enough to turn them into a string of quick visual gags. The affection is there. It’s just mostly coming from the human.

This one took the familiar “Old MacDonald” nursery rhyme and reworked it through the lens of 1990s hip-hop and music videos. MacDonald became the emcee, while the barnyard animals turned into his backup dancers, each with their own moves and attitude.

The fun was in treating the whole farm like a rap-video performance, with exaggerated poses, rhythmic animation, and a knowingly over-the-top throwback style. It gave a very familiar children’s song a completely different personality without losing the joke at the center of it.

This Halloween ecard turned a haunted mansion into a full-on dance party, with a vampire, mummy, witch, Frankenstein’s monster, and zombie all showing up for the night. The setup was simple: all your friends are there, the drinks are flowing, and Frankenstein’s monster is behind the decks spinning the hits.

I treated it like a goofy monster-house party, using the familiar Halloween archetypes as a cast of personalities rather than just decorations. Each character got their own dance moves and little moments, which made the whole thing feel more like a party you somehow got invited to than a standard Halloween card.