Google’s Valentine’s Day Doodle Features Six Tales Of Real Romance

Google has a Valentine’s Day doodle for their search homepage, the way they do every year. This one is fairly elaborate, however, and features stories supplied by Ira Glass and NPR’s This American Life (if you’re in the U.S.). Each story is animated using simple illustrations drawn on candy hearts, and each tells a story of love from a different perspective.

The video above shows the making of Google’s Valentine’s Day doodle, as described by the Doodler team within the company to TIME’s NewsFeed. You can see that a lot of work goes into the creation of any Google Doodle, but this one is especially elaborate. It’s also interesting to see how the animator has to balance considerations like what’s possible from an engineering perspective with mundane worries like file size.

Google is serving up a different doodle for international visitors, which features a mix-your-own box of chocolates that you can then actually send to your sweetie, and the company is also adding animated floating hearts to your Google+ photo uploads depicting hugging and kissing. They manage this using their Auto Awesome photo enhancing feature, and it’s yet another example of just how advanced Google is getting with regards to photo analysis and editing automation.

This may not be everyone’s favorite holiday, but Google’s approach to celebrating it is pretty adorable, even if you’re essentially a curmudgeon when it comes to chocolates, flowers and paper hearts.