A thoughtless human drives a cat to a remote forest and leaves it there. The frightened kitten wanders through the dark until it finds a witch’s home. The witch is making soup in a cauldron. What will happen to the cat?…

…In fact, the cat becomes part of the witch’s cat family. But the human? Well, the witch flies out on her broomstick, finds the driver and strikes them down.

It’s a beautifully told animated story filled with all the right Halloween frights – and a very unexpected resolve. It’s also one of a branded series by Unboring Company and Petlove, that subverts fantasy’s classic villains – witches, vampires and their kind – to make one point – however frightening these characters may look, there is one thing they would never do – abandon an animal. The campaign, Vilões (Villains) seizes the Halloween moment and the power of entertainment to send an awareness message about animal cruelty, signed off with the provocative endline, “Even evil has its limits. Not even the greatest villains abandon their pets.”

Its first episode, The Secret of the Forest, landed on YouTube and social media on Halloween Eve and kicks off a run of stories that follows the holiday and year-end vacation season. The episodes connect to form a universe of their own, in which the villains become animal-rights activists. The witch runs a daycare, the vampire keeps a sanctuary, and the characters cross over into one another’s stories.

Episode 2, Creatures of the Night, stars a vampire, and will premiere in the second half of November. The final two episodes tie into Christmas and the year-end summer holidays, running through Green December (Dezembro Verde), Brazil’s awareness month against animal abandonment.

The cause grows out of an activist streak that has been part of Petlove since its founding, and of a principle that guides its business decisions: pets at the centre of everything. According to estimates published by Agência Brasil, the Brazilian government’s news agency, some 30 million animals live in abandonment in the country — one of the highest figures in the world.

“Choosing a light-hearted tone for such an important subject is deliberate. We want to democratize understanding of a serious issue that needs to be discussed widely and responsibly. At Petlove, we work every day to make the world a place where every pet can be happier and healthier, and Villains lets us carry that message to even more people,” stated Bruno Junqueira, VP of people, ESG and corporate communications at Petlove.

The idea came when Unboring Company noticed that many of the great villains of literature and the oldest folk tales have a pet. “We’re an agency that builds extraordinary universes for brands. Every episode opens in horror mode. In the first one, a cat is dumped on a roadside and the forest seems to close in on it. The twist comes when you realise the witch is there to rescue the animal. And in the end, she gets her revenge on whoever abandoned it – in a fun way,” stated Luiz Villano, co-founder and CEO of Unboring.

Actress Myra Ruiz, who played the witch Elphaba in the Brazilian production of the musical Wicked for a decade, narrates the first episode and stars in one of the campaign’s social-media teasers. While sweeping her backyard with a witch’s broom, she hears a meow coming from a box. She finds a kitten, takes it in and carries it home. The film ends without revealing what happened to the two, and was released on October 29, just days before Halloween.

The look is part of the strategy. Animated in 2D and running over three minutes each, the episodes revive the visual style of 1980s and 1990s broadcast-TV cartoons such as He-Man and ThunderCats. That language speaks to the nostalgia of the audience most engaged with the cause: women over 35 who grew up on those cartoons and share animal content on their social feeds.

The campaign is a Petlove–São Paulo Metro partnership, the first time the transit company has teamed up with a pet-sector business. Over 24 months, the initiative includes films, static pieces, illustrations and other formats across on-board screens, totems and other railway line spaces, plus audio announcements on the trains. Throughout the partnership, Petlove and the Metro will also run initiatives for the animal cause, including training in animal handling and rescue, adoption events, vaccination drives and the distribution of educational materials — among them Villains comic books, which take the campaign’s characters into new adventures.

Wladimir Winter, co-founder and CCO of Unboring, a two-time Emmy Award winner and member of the International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, noted, “Cause campaigns usually inform, and information rarely changes behavior. Emotion does. Media buys attention, but it can’t buy sharing. A good story ends up in the family group chat, on your mom’s WhatsApp, with everyone who has a pet at home. That’s why, before being a campaign against abandonment, ‘Villains’ had to be good content. After all, the commitment to a pet doesn’t end when vacation starts – or when a campaign does.”