Every brand wants a piece of the Christmas ad break, and most of them arrive with a piano cover and a lump in the throat. Levi’s has gone the other way. “Let’s Get Fuzzy”, billed on the brand’s own YouTube channel as “the most terrifying cozy holiday film never to hit theaters”, is a 60-second stop-motion horror short about a yeti, a cabin in the woods and a red sweater. It was made direct-to-client with Blinkink directors Stevie Gee and Essy May, and it is one of the few holiday spots this season that looks like somebody actually enjoyed making it.
A cabin in the woods, in clay
The setup is pure genre. A snowy mountain range, a lonely log cabin, a red vintage car parked outside. Inside, five friends in Levi’s knits and denim lounge by the fire with a fluffy white dog, under strings of colored lights. One of them heads out for firewood, gets knocked flat in the snow, and a huge, hairy blue-grey hand looms over the roof. From there the directors run the whole horror playbook in miniature: Dutch angles, faces pressed in terror against the window, something moving under the floorboards, a hatch that will not stay shut, a door barricaded with sacks, a girl peeking through her fingers and, finally, the yeti itself, all fangs and fur, roaring into the lens.
The turn is simple and very Christmas. Instead of fighting the monster, the group throws it a giant red cable-knit sweater. Cut to the yeti, now buttoned into the cardigan and grinning, squashed into the gang on the rug by the fireplace like it has been coming to this party for years. The end card reads “Let’s Get Fuzzy – Happy Sweater Season” over the cabin under the northern lights, and the last gag lands quietly: pairs of red eyes glowing in the trees on either side of the frame. More guests are on the way.
What works
The craft is the argument. According to the production notes, the Blinkink team spent more than 2,000 build hours on three miniature cabins and 400 hand-made trees, and the costume makers knitted scaled-down versions of real pieces from Levi’s holiday collection, down to tiny red tabs on tiny 501s. You can feel it on screen. The knits have real texture, the yeti’s fur catches the firelight, and the lighting, cold teal outside and warm amber inside, does half the storytelling without a word of dialogue. For a fashion brand selling sweaters, making the fabric the most tactile thing in the frame is exactly right.
There is also some smart brand memory at work. Levi’s made advertising history in 1995 with “Clayman”, one of the first full-length TV commercials shot entirely in claymation, and this film is an open nod to it. Going back to clay is not nostalgia for its own sake; it gives Levi’s a holiday look that no supermarket, retailer or perfume house is using this year. In a week where every UK Christmas ad has competed on scale and celebrity, a handmade 60 seconds stands out simply by being small.
And the horror framing is genuinely fun. The directors say they are big horror fans and wrote 14 scripts before landing on this one, and it shows in the details: the hand over the roof, the floor hatch, the reaction shots borrowed straight from a slasher. It is closer to Gremlins than to a gift guide, and that gives the payoff a real release.
Where it falls short
For all the charm, the idea is thin. “Scary thing becomes cuddly when it gets a sweater” is a single beat, and the film spends most of its running time on the setup and very little on the reconciliation. The resolution happens in one cut: sweater thrown, yeti happy. There is no moment where the friends decide to be kind or the yeti earns its welcome, so the warmth the brand is selling arrives a little too cheaply.
The product story is also softer than it needs to be. This is a jeans brand pivoting its Christmas message to knitwear, but outside the final sweater gag the clothing is mostly background styling. Viewers will remember the yeti and the red cardigan; they may not remember that the cast was dressed head to toe in Levi’s. And with no voice, no line and no song hook to carry it, the spot leans entirely on its visuals, which is great on a big screen and riskier as a muted, scrolled-past social cut.
The verdict
“Let’s Get Fuzzy” is the most handsome holiday film Levi’s has made in years and a welcome break from the sentimental arms race of the season. The stop-motion craft is outstanding, the Clayman callback gives it real brand logic, and the red eyes in the woods are a perfect last laugh. What it lacks is a second idea: the story stops the moment the sweater goes on. As a piece of animation it is a gift. As a Christmas campaign, it is a lovely sweater with not much underneath.
Credits: Client: Levi Strauss and Co. (CMO Kenny Mitchell, Global Brand Creative Chad Hinson). Agency: client direct. Production: Blinkink, London. Directors: Stevie Gee and Essy May (Stevie and Essy). Executive Producers: Bart Yates, Josef Byrne. Producer: Rebecca Little. Director of Photography: Toby Howell. Production Designer: Gordon Allen. Animators: Andy Biddle, Laura Tofarides, Henry Nicholson, Honor Price, Andy Spradbery. Color: Black Kite Studios. Sound design: Fitzrovia Post.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5