Clash Royale launches Hero Balloon with a world built from real balloons

Clash Royale needed to launch Hero Balloon, a new in-game character whose card is one of the game's most psychologically devastating weapons. Season trailers are usually CGI, so the launch risked looking like every other mobile-game drop.

Launch a feared game character by making the whole campaign world from real balloons, then letting an advancing balloon hero destroy it — shot in camera, no CGI.

Uncommon Stockholm and production house Blinkink worked with Airigami's balloon artists to twist 10,486–10,487 biodegradable balloons into giant, handcrafted Clash Royale characters, castles and weapons. The 90-second film plays as a horror scene: a balloon Goblin trembles, a balloon King accepts his fate, and an advancing balloon Hero Balloon bursts everything — explosions filmed at 1,000 frames per second — set to a cover of Nena's '99 Luftballons'.

The film became Clios 'Ad of the Week', and industry coverage used it as proof that handmade craft still cuts through in a CGI- and AI-saturated season. It won a D&AD 2026 Yellow Pencil in Animation/Mixed Media.

When Supercell added Hero Balloon to Clash Royale, it had to announce a card built around fear: a slow, deadly balloon that players dread watching cross the arena. Uncommon Creative Studio Stockholm decided the launch itself should feel like that — a world that cannot survive the character's arrival.

So the team built the campaign world out of the only material that could dramatise that: balloons. Balloon artists Airigami twisted around 10,500 biodegradable balloons into large-scale, instantly recognisable Clash Royale characters and landscapes, then let an approaching Hero Balloon — also made of balloons — destroy them. Every swelling form, tense creak and explosion happened in camera.

The 90-second film, directed by Sam Gainsborough of Blinkink, borrows horror cinematography — extreme close-ups, dolly zooms, puppets swelling against the frame — while a cover of Nena's '99 Luftballons' keeps it absurd. Bursts were shot at 1,000 frames per second so torn rubber flies like shrapnel.

The craft-first approach paid off in attention: Clios made it Ad of the Week, praising its practical world-building in an era of AI and digital shortcuts, and the D&AD 2026 jury gave it a Yellow Pencil in Animation/Mixed Media.

The material matched the message: a balloon world literally cannot withstand the Hero Balloon, so the character's menace is demonstrated, not claimed.

Practical, hand-made production gave the film a texture and tension that a CGI spot could not deliver.

The reference to '99 Luftballons' layered in the story of a pop hit about balloons without a single digital effect.

Building recognizable game characters from an unexpected craft made the launch shareable and newsworthy.

When every competitor can render anything digitally, a physical constraint becomes the idea: making the world out of a fragile, ticking material gave the launch a tension CGI cannot fake.

Released in April 2026 alongside Clash Royale's Balloon Festival season, the film stood out in a wave of CGI game trailers and collected a D&AD 2026 Yellow Pencil, with Airigami's artists sharing credit as the campaign's makers. Coverage repeatedly framed it as a counter-example to AI-generated advertising — a small, physical world that took a week to build and seconds to destroy.