Three mice are stealing a shoe in Prada’s new holiday campaign, and they were drawn the way cartoon mice used to be drawn: by hand, on paper, one frame at a time. The campaign, called Drawing Prada: Animated by Hand, arrived Tuesday as a series of short films and photographs, and the names behind the drawings are the real story. Its animation was directed by John Pomeroy, who walked out of Disney in 1979 to help Don Bluth start a studio of his own.
Pomeroy’s career is a tour of the era. He started at Disney in 1973, trained under Frank Thomas, one of the studio’s legendary Nine Old Men, and animated on Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too. With Bluth and Gary Goldman, he co-founded Don Bluth Productions, where he was a key artist on The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail and The Land Before Time, and helped create the Dragon’s Lair arcade game. He later returned to Disney as the supervising animator of Captain John Smith in Pocahontas and the lead character designer for Milo Thatch in Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
For lead animators, Pomeroy brought in twin brothers Tom and Tony Bancroft. Tom designed and supervised Mushu in Mulan and went on to make Pencils vs. Pixels, a documentary defending hand-drawn animation. Tony supervised Pumbaa in The Lion King and co-directed Mulan. In Prada’s behind-the-scenes film, Tom Bancroft says Pomeroy “called the band back together,” and Pomeroy sums up the approach himself: “I learned my craft with pencil and paper.”
The finished pieces place Prada ambassadors Sadie Sink, Maya Hawke, Chen Haoyu and Kelvin Harrison Jr., along with Luther Ford, inside illustrated winter scenes photographed by Glen Luchford, whose lighting and camera angles were matched to the drawings so the actors and the animals appear to share the same world. Sink’s scene belongs to the three mice making off with a shoe. Hawke meets a fox out in the snow. A lynx takes an interest in Chen’s scene. Every animal has its own personality and its own small mission.
Pomeroy has been clear about why the work had to be done this way. In the behind-the-scenes film, he says there is “a very distinct and purposeful reason to do hand-drawn animation,” and that is to show “that hand-drawn and handcrafted work is still alive in the world today.” That is the note the campaign keeps hitting online, where viewers have been sharing the films less as an advertisement than as a reminder of what animation felt like in the era of Saturday mornings and worn-out VHS tapes. As Cartoon Brew pointed out in its coverage, the major studios have largely walked away from lush, classic hand-drawn work, which is part of why a holiday campaign became the place to find it.
Drawing Prada is out now across Prada’s channels, films and photographs together. For anyone who grew up on the movies Pomeroy and the Bancroft brothers made the first time around, it plays less like an ad break than a reunion. It is also the same hope Bluth himself has chased for years: back in 2020, he launched a new studio of his own to bring hand-drawn animation back. Six years on, some of the artists who started that era alongside him are still making the case, one pencil drawing at a time.