Most luxury holiday films this season are chasing the same thing: a tear, a heirloom, a hug at the door. Prada went somewhere stranger and, for once, genuinely charming. “Drawing Prada: Animated by Hand” drops five live-action faces – Sadie Sink, Maya Hawke, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Chen Haoyu and Luther Ford – into a pencil-and-paper winter forest drawn by a team led by John Pomeroy, the veteran animator behind John Smith in Disney’s Pocahontas and a co-founder of Don Bluth Productions. The 55-second film is a love letter to the hand-drawn features of the 1970s and 80s. The question is whether it is also an ad.
WHAT HAPPENS ON SCREEN
The film opens on boots crunching through a painted snowscape and a white Prada bag swinging past a cartoon marmot, who stares straight at the camera like he wandered in from The Rescuers. A pair of leopard-print loafers sits on a wooden cabin floor until a human hand reaches for them. From there it is a chain of small scenes. A woman in a red dress walks through the pines with a drawn lynx padding beside her. A man in a black jacket and backpack trudges through the snow while a grey, wolf-like creature sizes him up. Inside a firelit cabin, rabbits inspect a pair of loafers and bats hang from the coat stand. A gang of mice makes off with a polka-dot loafer and disappears into a mouse hole, and Sink, on her knees by the fireplace, peers in after them to find the shoe sitting in a miniature pile of stolen holiday gifts. A ground squirrel trips a walker into a snowdrift, a fox gives the camera a knowing look, and the film closes on a pale blue “Drawing Prada” card.
There is no dialogue, no voiceover and no product line read. The products are simply there: the bags in the hands, the loafers on the floor, the coats in the snow.
CREDITS
Brand: Prada. Campaign: Holiday 2026, “Drawing Prada: Animated by Hand.” Film: 0:55, published on Prada’s official YouTube channel alongside a longer making-of film. Concept and creative direction: Ferdinando Verderi. Director and photographer: Glen Luchford. Animation direction: John Pomeroy. Styling: Olivier Rizzo. Set design: Gideon Ponte. Production: Partner Films (Art Partner). Talent: Sadie Sink, Maya Hawke, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Chen Haoyu, Luther Ford. Credits per Partner Films, Art Partner, Animation World Network and Cartoon Brew.
THE EXECUTION
The craft is the whole pitch, and it holds up. The animals move the way classic studio animals moved, with weight, squash and a little too much personality, and the painted backgrounds have that soft, slightly faded storybook quality that digital pipelines usually polish away. Luchford’s live-action work is the quiet hero: the lighting and perspective on each actor are matched to the drawn sets closely enough that the composites rarely feel pasted on. The firelit cabin scenes in particular look like frames from a lost Bluth feature with a fashion shoot spliced in.
The mouse heist is the best idea in the film. It turns a loafer into the object everyone wants, gives the product a reason to be on screen, and lets Sink do something more than pose – she gets to be curious, a little annoyed and then delighted. It is the one beat that works as a story and as a sales message at the same time.
WHAT WORKS AND WHAT DOESN’T
What works: the stance. In a year when every brand is being asked about AI imagery, a luxury house paying a team of veteran animators to draw by hand is a statement in itself, and the accompanying making-of film, where Pomeroy talks about the value of the human touch, makes the argument explicit. It also feels like Prada: slightly odd, a little arch, more interested in an idea than in sentiment. Next to the glossy star vehicles from other luxury brands this week, it stands out by refusing to be glossy.
What doesn’t: at 55 seconds, the film is more a sampler than a story. Five celebrities, a dozen animals and several locations are squeezed into less than a minute, so most of the cast get one or two shots and no moment of their own. Hawke, Harrison Jr., Chen and Ford are reduced to people walking past cartoons, which is a waste of actors this good. The edit also leans on the animals so heavily that the clothes become background – it is easier to remember the fox than the coat. And the hand-drawn luxury spot is no longer a new trick; Givenchy did a 101 Dalmatians film with Disney veteran Eric Goldberg in 2022, and Prada’s own 2024 holiday campaign also came out of an animation studio. Prada executes the idea beautifully, but it does not push it much further than it has been pushed before.
VERDICT
“Drawing Prada: Animated by Hand” is the most likable luxury holiday film of the week: handmade, witty in small doses and built around a point of view about craft that the brand can actually defend. The mouse heist alone earns its place. But a cast this strong deserved a story rather than a montage, and the film works better as a set of gorgeous stills than as one continuous commercial. Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
