John Lewis, a British department store known for tearjerking holiday ads that rack up millions of YouTube page views, is out with its 2014 commercial featuring a CGI penguin looking for love in a hopeless place to the tune of a cover of John Lennon’s “Real Love.”
Sure, Monty the penguin has fun bouncing on trampolines with the boy he lives with. But in the weeks before the holidays, when he’s watching romantic movies and seeing couples take leisurely strolls in the snow, he decides he wants something more than just fetching plastic building blocks for an elementary school kid and eating the boy’s leftovers at meal times. Where are the other pet penguins for him to play with in London? Are they on Tinder?
Just when he thought he would be alone forever, he wakes up Christmas morning to find a penguin in a box waiting for him under the family’s Christmas tree. For, you know, friendship.
Satirists are already having a field day with the spot, joking that it condones sex trafficking in the penguin world.
Update: @JohnLewis is not the department store, Twitter:
.@R11Gordon Thanks, but my delivery fee to the UK is enormous. Best go local: @johnlewisretail
— John Lewis (@johnlewis) November 6, 2014
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Write to Olivia B. Waxman at olivia.waxman@time.com