Death-penalty protests don't usually rise to the level of art, and commercials never do, but a beautiful new ad from Amnesty International comes awfully close. Wax figurines of execution devices -- of guns, a noose, an electric chair, and the like -- melt under the light of the Amnesty International [2] candle. "Death to the death penalty," the tag line goes.

It's a gorgeous, haunting remonstrance (made moreso by piano music that feels so much more appropriate here than in all those gloopy NBA commercials [3]). The figurines look like they're real wax, but they were actually generated almost entirely in CG. Apparently, live statues would've looked too much like stop-motion, meaning, we assume, they wouldn't have melted with the fluidity that makes the commercial so damn eerie.

The brains behind the spot were TBWA Paris [4] and the French digital-art collective Pleix, whose name you might recall because of their video of dogs soaring through the air in slo-mo, which has became something of a Internet sensation. Here's the clip, in all its faintly menacing glory.

Their trademark seems to dark and unsettling stuff: They've projected film of old people's heads attached to body-builder torsos on a medieval church in Paris and produced a film called "Beauty kit for little girls," complete with a breast implant demo alongside the advice, "Don't wait for nature." (Ah, French irony. It's as subtle as the last open button on Bernard Henri Lévy [5]'s shirt.) See more of their work here [6].