Apple is hoping its feel-good holiday ad campaign — featuring a chorus of woodland creatures singing about friendship — will inspire consumers to rush out and buy a brand-newiPhone 17.
On Thursday, Apple released “A Critter Carol,” a 2-minute, 24-second film starring nine handmade animal puppets that was (of course!) shot entirely onthe recently released iPhone 17 Pro. The ad was directed by award-winning Australian filmmaker Mark Molloy, who has previously worked on Apple commercials and made hisfeature directorial debut with Netflix’s “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.” (Watch the ad below or on YouTube atthis link.)
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The story begins when a hiker accidentally drops his iPhone 17 Pro in a snowy forest. The device is discovered by a group of critters — a raccoon, bear, rat, owl, deer, squirrel, rabbit, mole and deer — who film themselves on the smartphone singing “Friends,” a song originally recorded by New Zealand music-comedy duo Flight of the Conchords (who starred in an HBO original series that ran for two seasons).
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When the hiker and his partner return to the scene (using Apple’s Find My app on his Apple Watch to locate the iPhone), the animals scatter in a panic. He picks up the phone, lying in a heart-shaped arrangement of twigs — and as he the magical video recording plays, he turns a bewildered eye to the woods around him. “Hope they like it!” exclaims the mole, before being shushed by the racoon. The tagline: “Friendship Is a Gift.”
Apple’s “A Critter Carol” will roll out globally across broadcast TV, digital platforms and social media. In the U.S., a cut-down version of the spot will air on TV starting with NBC’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade coverage.
Apple also released abehind-the-scenes vignette about the production, which includes a look at the making of the puppets and their human puppeteers. “I wanted to embrace the tactile nature of puppetry,” Molloy says in the BTS video. “I was really keen to go back to craftsmanship.”
The tech giant’s 2025 holiday ad is deliberately analog, designed to emphasize the power and warmth of human creativity. In addition to the handmade and hand-operated puppets, for example, the typography used in the campaign was handprinted from wood blocks. Recall thatApple suffered a rare marketing misstep with last year’s “Crush!” iPad ad, which showed a massive hydraulic press literally crushing a bunch of creative and artistic objects into an ultra-thin tablet — a message some in Hollywood saw as presaging the obliteration of human creativity by technologies like generative AI.
In the “Critter Carol” ad, the puppets are enlisted to showcase the new iPhone 17 Pro’s advanced camera capabilities, such as 8x Zoom, Center Stage selfies (which lets you shift from portrait to landscape mode without rotating the phone) and Dual Capture (which records on front and rear cameras simultaneously). “The power of the iPhone 17 Pro allowed me to capture the story in a really immersive way,” Molloy says in the behind-the-scenes video.
The commercial was shot on a soundstage in Prague. The ad agency behind the spot was TBWA\Media Arts Lab, which works exclusively with Apple. The production companies on it were Smuggler and Prague-based Unit+Sofa. Joost van Gelder served as director of photography and Andy Kelly was production designer.
Watch Apple’s “A Critter Carol”:
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