Escape Force (Ranger AF3)

A sneaker collab with no product in the film. Nike and Nigo reissued the Air Force 3 as the "Ranger AF3" — a color-blocked leather nod to Japan's Super Sentai team-hero format — and launched it with two minutes of anime-opening melodrama in which the shoe itself barely appears. Director Gary Levesque stages Nigo inside a lab piloting a giant mecha while a color-coded squad transforms into animals, soars, traverses land and sea. Wizz and Psyop handle the animation with the earnest maximalism the genre demands. Antfood scores it in 80s Japanese City Pop — sequenced drums, vintage synths, soaring guitar solos, a melancholic female vocal that holds the whole thing together. The strategic move is identifying that for Nigo's audience, the cultural memory the shoe is pointing at matters more than the shoe. Sentai and City Pop are both genres built on specific emotional grammar: melancholy and hope in equal measure, camp that takes itself seriously. Recreate that feeling convincingly enough and the product becomes a souvenir of the world you just built. Manchester Animation Festival selected it into their 2025 Animated Commercial Curiosities program.