Dear Alice Inspiration

Overview

One of the most visible threads running through Outbound is its soft, sunlit, almost storybook take on a near-future countryside. That look did not appear out of nowhere. Tobi Schnackenberg, co-founder of Square Glade Games, has repeatedly pointed to a single animated yogurt commercial as a foundational reference: "Dear Alice," a one-minute short produced by London studio The Line for Chobani and released in June 2021. The piece, widely read as a mainstream entry point to the solarpunk aesthetic, gave the Outbound team a visual north star for what an optimistic, hand-painted future could feel like on screen.

This article covers what "Dear Alice" actually is, who made it, why it resonated so strongly with cozy game developers in the mid-2020s, and the specific ways its influence shows up in Outbound's art style and aesthetic.

What Is Dear Alice

"Dear Alice" is a 2D animated commercial commissioned by the American yogurt brand Chobani and produced by The Line, a London-based animation studio. It runs roughly one minute and was first published in 2021 as part of a broader Chobani campaign about where food comes from. On the surface it is an advertisement, but the film plays more like a short film in its own right, and audiences reacted to it as one.

The story is structured as a letter. A grandmother writes to her granddaughter Alice about the work of building a better world, and the camera follows a young farmer through her day: tending crops, harvesting with the help of gentle machines, sharing a meal. In the final beats the film reveals that the young woman on screen is Alice herself, now grown, and the letter is the one she once received. The central line, "Our job is to plant seeds so our grandkids get to enjoy the fruit," became the piece's emotional anchor and the reason viewers shared it well beyond Chobani's intended audience.

Key Credits

The Line Studio

The Line is a BAFTA-nominated collective of designers, directors, and animators based in London. The studio is known for mixing illustrative 2D work with cinematic staging for commercial clients and short films, and it has built a reputation for intricately painted backgrounds layered with hand-drawn character animation. On "Dear Alice," the studio assembled a large international team across concept art, character design, background painting, storyboarding, and compositing, with Antoine Perez serving as art director and Bishoy Gendi leading animation under Aschim's direction.

For game developers looking for a visual language that felt cozy rather than cynical, the studio's approach offered a clear model: warm, painterly environments that read instantly from a distance, quiet human-scale staging, and character work that leaned friendly instead of cartoonish.

Studio Ghibli Influences

"Dear Alice" is often described as Ghibli-adjacent, and that comparison is not only about vibe. Joe Hisaishi, the composer best known for scoring nearly every Hayao Miyazaki film from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind through The Boy and the Heron, wrote an original score for the short. His involvement pulled the piece directly into the orbit of Ghibli's musical identity, and viewers responded accordingly. Press coverage from outlets such as Nerdist and Kotaku framed the commercial as a spiritual cousin to Miyazaki's work, with Kotaku's headline memorably calling it "That Ghibli-Ass Chobani Commercial."

The visual DNA also draws on Miyazaki's broader catalogue. The rolling agricultural landscapes evoke the countryside of My Neighbor Totoro, the airborne machines and blimp-like windmills recall Castle in the Sky and Howl's Moving Castle, and the gentle relationship between people, animals, and technology is pure Miyazaki pastoral. None of this is imitation in a narrow sense. "Dear Alice" is clearly its own film, but it openly inherits Ghibli's belief that the future can be drawn with the same warmth as the past.

Solarpunk Aesthetic

Solarpunk is a design and literary movement that imagines futures where renewable energy, ecological restoration, and human community are the default rather than the exception. Where cyberpunk is concerned with neon, rain, and collapse, solarpunk is concerned with sunlight, gardens, and repair. "Dear Alice" became one of the movement's most recognizable visual artifacts almost overnight, because it translated those abstract values into a single, concrete minute of film.

Viewers saw floating wind turbines tethered like kites, automated harvesters moving slowly through orchards, greenhouses woven into rural architecture, and farmers who looked tired in a satisfying way rather than oppressed. That combination mattered for cozy game design. It showed that sustainability as a theme could be expressed with color and staging instead of lectures, and that a world could be both technologically advanced and handmade.

How Outbound Draws From It

Tobi Schnackenberg has been explicit about the connection in press interviews. Summarizing the pitch for Outbound, he told Creative Bloq that the team was "trying to portray a world where mankind has learned to coexist with nature and with technology in a way that is mutually beneficial," and he cited "Dear Alice" directly as an inspiration for that optimistic depiction of farming in the future. The resemblance is easy to trace once you know to look for it.

Color Palette

Outbound leans on the same warm, high-saturation palette that defines "Dear Alice": buttery yellows in the sky, leafy greens across the hills, rust and terracotta in wood and metal, and soft blues for water and shadow. The lighting feels like late afternoon almost everywhere, the exact hour the Chobani short lives in. This is a deliberate departure from the darker, desaturated tone of survival games the project is sometimes compared to, and it pulls the game closer to an animated short than a simulation.

Architecture

Buildings in Outbound read as lived-in rural structures that happen to carry modern technology gracefully. Sheds and cabins use pitched roofs, visible timber, and stone foundations, then quietly integrate solar panels and small wind turbines. That vocabulary is lifted almost directly from "Dear Alice," where farmhouses and outbuildings sit comfortably beside large clean-energy infrastructure without feeling retrofitted. The idea is that green technology should look like it belongs, not like it was bolted on.

Vegetation

Both works treat plants as scene partners rather than set dressing. The Chobani short spends real screen time on tomato vines, sunflowers, and orchard trees, and Outbound does the same with its farming plots, wild berries, and foraged ingredients. The silhouettes of trees and bushes in Outbound use simplified, slightly flattened shapes that match the painterly approach The Line took for backgrounds, where leaves read as clusters of color rather than individual textures.

Character Design

Outbound's NPCs borrow the friendly, practical body language of the characters in "Dear Alice." There is no superhero proportion, no armor, no grit by default. Farmers and travelers wear work clothes, carry tools, and fit into their environment. That read of ordinary competence, quiet people doing quiet work, is one of the easiest ways to recognize the Chobani short's DNA in the game.

World Design

The biggest single idea Outbound takes from "Dear Alice" is the belief that the whole world should feel like one coherent painting. Square Glade Games has said the team built each region of the game's biomes by hand rather than using procedural tools, which is the only way to get the deliberate, composed feeling the reference short has in every frame. Sailing boats sit on distant horizons instead of tankers; the outdoors and the coast stay legible at a glance; nothing visually shouts. That is the "Dear Alice" lesson applied at the scale of an entire open world.

Tobi's Direct Inspiration

The origin story Tobi usually tells about Outbound begins on a road trip from Germany back to the Netherlands, when he passed an old-school camper van driving through a field of solar panels and wind turbines. That moment gave him the image of the camper van as a mobile tiny home powered by the environment around it, which became the core fantasy of the game and the anchor for its energy system.

"Dear Alice" came in as the visual vocabulary for that idea. If the road trip gave Outbound its premise, the Chobani short gave it a palette and a mood. In the Creative Bloq interview that framed the ad as an "unlikely inspiration," Tobi described the game's goal in language that maps almost word for word onto how critics described the short: a near-future where people, nature, and technology live together on purpose rather than by accident. The team has also pointed to Firewatch for its flat-shaded stylization, but "Dear Alice" is the reference that explains why Outbound feels warm rather than lonely.

Broader Influences on the Game

"Dear Alice" is the clearest single reference, but it sits inside a wider set of touchstones that shaped Outbound through development and into the successful Kickstarter campaign. Studio Ghibli's pastoral films sit at the root of both the commercial and the game, filtered through Joe Hisaishi's score on one side and Outbound's own soundtrack by Tyler Zane on the other. Firewatch contributes the flat-shaded color blocking and the confidence to let a player stand still in a landscape. Above Snakes contributes the idea of a world that grows around the player instead of being discovered in a fixed shape. Real vanlife culture contributes the grounded, practical side of survival that keeps the optimism from floating away.

What makes "Dear Alice" load-bearing in that list is that it is the one reference that pulls all the others together. It is Ghibli in spirit, solarpunk in theme, hand-painted in execution, and exactly the length of a mood. Square Glade Games did not set out to copy it. They set out to build a game that could leave a player feeling the way the short does, and most of Outbound's art direction is a long answer to that question.