Apple’s New All-Puppet Holiday Ad Is Pretty Cute

This Apple ad isn’t the first time somebody has shot something on an iPhone that looked quite good, a far cry from the earlier days of digital cameras that couldn’t even be mentioned in the same room as the equipment one would use to shoot an advertisement.

And more of the ad’s pop has to do with the fact that Apple used puppets to star in A Critter Carol and not AI slop, like last year’s poorly received, lazy, AI-generated Coca-Cola Christmas ad.

It’s rather that it just hit me that after years and generations of speeding toward the highest-level specs we could wedge into our lives and then make them part of our daily lives—cameras with pointlessly high megapixel counts and AI that can churn out slop as fast as we can think it—people still appreciate the human touch, the sit-down meal of involving people in the creation of our art.

Apple’s New Ad Was Shot on an iPhone 17 Pro

It’s not like there’s no digital trickery involved. The puppets were controlled by puppeteers in blue jumpsuits so that they could be erased from the frame in post-production. And the whole ad is for a smartphone, a wickedly advanced computer with more computing power than most of the machines that took astronauts to space in the 20th century.

But still, it’s not hard to get the sense that the snubbing, even partially, of AI only a few years into its widespread public release is part of a larger trend toward vinyl records, dumbphones, and simpler cameras mimicking the Y2K era.

You can see the good, old-fashioned puppetry that went into creating the ad in Apple’s behind-the-scenes video above. There’s a magic in seeing a company choose to involve people in creating art even when it’s more complicated and more expensive, because there’s a magic in it, even if it is just ultimately to sell more phones.

You hear that, Coca-Cola? Find somebody to drive a real 18-wheeler this year.