At a time when AI has become more pervasive in advertising, a return to traditional techniques can feel like an act of rebellion. Those methods may come with steeper production costs but are proving worthwhile for brands like Prada, whose new hand-drawn holiday campaign has drawn widespread praise online since debut Wednesday night.
For its 2026 holiday campaign, aptly titled “Drawing Prada: Animated by Hand,” the Italian fashion house enlisted veteran Disney animator John Pomeroy to create a hand-drawn winter wonderland starring Sadie Sink, Maya Hawke, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Chen Haoyu and Luther Ford.
The campaign, conceived under creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, combines live-action photography with traditional pencil-and-paper animation, placing its cast alongside illustrated woodland creatures in a series of whimsical holiday scenes. In one image, Sink encounters a group of mice attempting to carry off a polka-dot Prada loafer, while another features Hawke alongside an animated fox in a snowy forest.
Pomeroy, whose decades-long animation career includes work on Disney’s “Pocahontas,” “Fantasia 2000” and “The Land Before Time,” led a team of artists using traditional hand-drawing techniques to create the campaign’s animated characters and landscapes. Photographer Glen Luchford shot the actors with lighting and perspectives designed to match the illustrated environments.
“There’s a very distinct and purposeful reason to do hand-drawn animation, and that’s to see that there’s value in the human touch,” Pomeroy said in a behind-the-scenes video released by Prada. “And that hand-drawn and handcrafted work is still alive in the world today.”
The campaign arrives as the fashion and advertising industries continue to experiment with generative AI, raising questions about the future of traditional creative work. According to a 2026 report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, nearly two-thirds of digital video ad buyers now use generative AI in creative production, up from roughly half in 2025. Coca-Cola, meanwhile, has faced backlash for its AI-generated holiday commercials, which it produced for two consecutive years in 2024 and 2025.
The project also marks a continuation of Prada’s longstanding relationship with cinema. Last year’s holiday campaign, “A Winter’s Tale,” similarly featured Hawke in a cinematic winter setting photographed by Luchford, though this year’s installment trades its more conventional live-action imagery for an illustrated fantasy.
The campaign’s still images, short films and behind-the-scenes footage are available on Prada’s website.