Stranger Things star Sadie Sink’s Prada campaign makes the pencil a luxury after AI ads

In Prada’s new holiday campaign, a few small mice make off with Sadie Sink’s shoes. They are drawn by hand, with pencil and paper, by a team led by John Pomeroy, an animator who learned the trade at Disney and co-founded the studio that once built a whole feature around a widowed field mouse. Prada calls the campaign Drawing Prada. WWD, which had the images first, gave it a sharper name: “Prada’s antidote to AI slop.”

That phrase belongs to WWD, not to Prada, and it is the right one to argue with. After two Christmases in which Coca-Cola filled its holiday ads with generated animals and McDonald’s in the Netherlands pulled an AI spot within days, a hand-drawn campaign from a luxury house is not a nostalgic flourish. It is a price signal. MCM’s reading is that human-made images are turning into a premium feature of advertising, the way hand-stitching became one in leather goods, and the line is falling where luxury lines always fall. The pencil goes to the handbag. The generator goes to the soda.

What Sadie Sink’s Prada holiday campaign shows

The facts come from WWD’s exclusive and from DSCENE, which published the campaign the day it went out. The stills are by the British photographer Glen Luchford. Around his photographs sit illustrated winter scenes and animals drawn by Pomeroy’s artists. The cast is young and international: Sadie Sink and Maya Hawke, who grew up on screen together in Stranger Things, the Chinese singer and actor Chen Haoyu, also known as Amy Chen, plus Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Luther Ford. According to WWD, a cynical fox follows Hawke through the snow, a snow lynx goes after Chen’s bag, rabbits and bats play with Ford’s leather accessories, and the mice steal Sink’s Prada shoes.

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The still images come with short films that, in WWD’s description, blend live action with two-dimensional animation, and a behind-the-scenes video about the drawing process. MCM has seen the released stills, not the films, so everything said here about the moving images is the trade press’s account. What the stills do show is the premise: real actors, real accessories, and creatures that make no attempt to look photographic. Nobody is meant to mistake the mice for mice.

Sink is a deliberate choice for that premise. She has fronted Prada before, opposite Benedict Cumberbatch in the house’s Re-Nylon documentary films on ocean plastic, and she arrives here after a stretch spent on stage and in a superhero film rather than in front of a ring light: a Tony-nominated Broadway run in John Proctor Is the Villain, Robert Icke’s Romeo & Juliet in London’s West End, and an undisclosed role in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Her career reads as a run of choices that favour the material over exposure. A campaign that asks her to play opposite a pencil drawing suits that reputation better than a red-carpet shoot would.

Why the pencil is the point of Prada’s Sadie Sink campaign

The decision that defines Drawing Prada is the hiring of Pomeroy, and his biography is the argument. He started at Disney as a background artist and animated on Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too. He left with Don Bluth and Gary Goldman to found the studio that made The Secret of NIMH, was directing animator on An American Tail, another film about mice, and went back to Disney to supervise John Smith in Pocahontas and to work on Fantasia 2000. Then Disney briefly shut its traditional animation department, and he went freelance.

So the craft Prada is paying for is one the film industry already decided, within living memory, was too slow and too expensive to keep at scale. That is precisely why a luxury house wants it. Luxury has always sold visible labour: the hand-stitched seam, the hours on the workshop floor. In the behind-the-scenes clip quoted by WWD, Pomeroy makes the case in those terms. “There’s a very distinct and purposeful reason to do hand-drawn animation, and that’s to see that there’s value in it and that hand-drawn and handcrafted work is still alive in the world today,” he says. And: “I learned my craft with pencil and paper.” DSCENE wrote that his comments establish the project’s “focus on human artistry.” The mice are a receipt for hours worked.

The AI holiday ads that set up Prada’s campaign

The contrast Prada is drawing against has a name in every newsroom that covered last Christmas. Coca-Cola remade its own “Holidays Are Coming” with generative AI and, according to NBC News, did it again the following year with two “AI studios,” Silverside and Secret Level, producing animated-looking films full of trucks and wide-eyed animals. Film Stories described one of them as a parade of “rabbits and squirrels with huge eyes that stare deep into your very soul.”

McDonald’s went further and fared worse. Its Dutch arm posted a 45-second spot titled “It’s the Most Terrible Time of the Year,” built entirely from AI-generated people suffering holiday mishaps, as TODAY reported. It was made by the production company The Sweetshop with the agency TBWANeboko. TechRadar reported that McDonald’s switched off the comments and then delisted the video three days after launch, and drew the lesson in one line: “just because you can make an ad with AI doesn’t mean you should.” McDonald’s Netherlands said the spot was meant “to reflect the stressful moments that can occur during the holidays.”

The best case against Prada’s pencil: the AI Christmas ad

The defenders of those ads deserve a hearing in their own words, because their argument is stronger than the backlash suggests. Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s global head of generative AI, told The Hollywood Reporter that “the haters on the Internet are the loudest,” and that “a lot of the people complaining last year were from the creative industry who were just afraid – afraid for their jobs, afraid for what it did. But I think the spot tested really well and average people really enjoyed it.” In the NBC News report, he added that the first AI film “performed exceptionally well and was a success with customers.” Melanie Bridge, chief executive of The Sweetshop, rejected the idea that her McDonald’s ad was a shortcut: her team “generated what felt like dailies – thousands of takes,” she wrote, and shaped them like any high-end production. “This wasn’t an AI trick. It was a film.” TechRadar, no fan of the spot, granted that “wrestling AI hallucinations into coherence is hardly easy.” On this view, the generator is just a new set of brushes, the complaints come from people whose jobs are on the line, and a cartoon fox selling a handbag is no more virtuous than a generated polar bear selling a soft drink.

Most of that can be true at once, and none of it undoes the thesis. It strengthens it. If Thakar is right that ordinary viewers enjoy generated ads, then generated images become the default at the mass end of the market, and the hand-drawn frame becomes what defaults never are: scarce. Coca-Cola itself hedged. NBC News reported that the same campaign also ran a traditionally produced spot set to “Feliz Navidad,” with human actors and conventional computer animation. A brand that sells by the billion can afford one human-made ad as insurance. A brand that sells bags at Prada’s prices can make the human hand the whole message.

The fair objection to Prada is a different one. The house never wrote “anti-AI” in its own announcement; that framing is WWD’s. Nothing in the coverage says how many artists worked on the films, what the production cost, or whether any digital tools touched the finished frames. A campaign can celebrate the pencil and still be finished on a computer, as nearly all modern hand-drawn animation is. Prada is selling the story of handwork as much as the handwork itself.

That is the uncomfortable part for anyone who reads Drawing Prada as good news for animators. Pomeroy says he wants to carry the craft “forward into future generations.” Crafts survive on volume, on apprentices and steady commissions, not on one seasonal luxury campaign a year. If hand-drawn work becomes something a fashion house buys at Christmas to signal that it can afford people, it survives the way couture survives: admired, expensive and rare. That is a living, of a kind, for a small number of artists. It is not a pipeline.

What Prada has said about Drawing Prada, and what it has not

Confirmed by WWD and DSCENE: the campaign was released on 27 October 2026; the photographs are by Glen Luchford; the animation was directed by John Pomeroy, who called the job “an absolute honor”; the cast is Sadie Sink, Maya Hawke, Chen Haoyu, Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Luther Ford; Prada has also released short films and a behind-the-scenes video. Pomeroy’s career dates are on the public record: Disney from 1973, Don Bluth Productions from 1979, and his exit from Disney in 2003, when it briefly closed its traditional animation department. The ads it is being read against are equally documented: Coca-Cola’s AI “Holidays Are Coming” films of 2024 and 2025, the second released on 3 November 2025, and the McDonald’s Netherlands spot posted on 6 December 2025 and pulled three days later.

Open: whether Prada intends the campaign as a statement about AI at all, since the phrase “antidote to AI slop” comes from WWD rather than the brand; the size of the drawing team and the budget; and how the short films play, which MCM has not seen. Interpretation, clearly labelled: the split between generated ads for mass brands and handmade ones for luxury houses is MCM’s reading of two holiday seasons, not a trend anyone has measured. The mice took Sadie Sink’s shoes. Prada is betting that the hand that drew them is now the more valuable thing to own.

Tags: Sadie Sink, Maya Hawke, Prada, Coca-Cola, Holiday ads, John Pomeroy

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