I guess I wasn’t paying attention when United Airline’s Dragon ad played during the Super Bowl, but the Drawn blog pointed it out for me:
The piece is stop-motion animation using cut-out paper characters. The provided link also has a short making-of doc that details the process of creating the animation and all of the people involved. The making of special stars the ad’s director, Jamie Caliri, who also brought us the brilliant closing credit sequence from Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.