Hebru Brantley Drew a Childhood for Apple's Holiday Film

Hebru Brantley went back through his own childhood sketchbooks to draw somebody else's. Every piece of art in The Dreamer, Apple's holiday film for 2026, is his, from a small boy's first scribbles to the animated character that closes it. Melina Matsoukas directed the Apple holiday ad, and it runs four minutes without a line of dialogue.

That was the smart call. Apple could have hired a room of illustrators to fake a kid's hand at six, at twelve and at twenty. It asked one artist to remember his.

A Boy Learns to Hide His Drawings

The Dreamer follows a boy who draws all the time, and then stops showing anyone. School does it. The other kids react, and he learns to keep the pictures to himself.

He grows up. The drawing goes quiet, though it never fully leaves him.

Then, one Christmas, his parents give him a MacBook Neo. He photographs the old drawings with an iPhone, lines them up on the laptop, and they start to move. The film ends on his character, animated, set to Give Me a Dream by Strawberry Guy. Apple's own description is one sentence long, a film "about a parents' gift that helps their son rediscover his creativity."

Bradford Young shot it, the cinematographer behind Selma and Arrival. Look at what's in the frame with the family and you'll see old Apple hardware, an iPhone 3GS and an iMac from around 2010, and a father taking a picture of his son mid drawing on a phone that's now a relic. Creative Review read that as a nod to the current taste for vintage tech. It also noticed what isn't there. No AI appears anywhere in the film, and the laptop only ever shows up as a tool.

Brantley Put His Own Mother in the Idea

Brantley was born in Chicago in 1981 and came up in Bronzeville, painting graffiti before he showed in galleries. His best known character is Flyboy, a kid in aviator goggles drawn from the Tuskegee Airmen. In October 2019 he built Flyboy a whole neighborhood, the walk through installation Nevermore Park in Pilsen.

So a story about a boy and his characters isn't a stretch for him. He has said his mother saw the artist in him before he could see it himself, which is the film's plot with the laptop taken out. "Our experiences shape what we create," he told Adweek.

He drew the closing character on a MacBook Neo, too. Apple has a second, shorter film called Creating the Art that shows him at work.

Matsoukas is the other half of it. She directed Beyoncé's Formation in 2016 and the feature Queen & Slim in 2019, and she was the first woman and the first person of color to win the Directors Guild award for commercials, for the Beats by Dr. Dre film You Love Me. Beats has belonged to Apple since the deal that became Apple Music closed in August 2014. "My goal with work is to create pieces that move people and create change in the world," she said.

She made it through Prettybird and her own company, De La Revolución, for Apple's longtime agency TBWA Media Arts Lab.

Apple Keeps Making Its Holidays by Hand

The Dreamer is the third Apple holiday film in four years built around something made by hand. Fuzzy Feelings in 2023 was stop motion. A Critter Carol in 2025 used handmade puppets, filmed in Prague. This year it's pencil on paper.

It isn't only the holiday work, either. When Apple Music changed its identity in October, the agency was again TBWA Media Arts Lab, and the new logo was shaped by sound, a Fred again.. composition played through a tray of liquid and filmed as it rippled. Nobody drew it on a screen first.

Two things are new this time. A Mac is the gift, after years of holiday films led by AirPods and iPhones. And it's the first holiday film since John Ternus took over as chief executive on September 1, a run that started with the AirPods 5 and reached the living room in October with HomeView.

Anyone can type a sentence and get a cartoon back now. Apple's holiday film is about a kid with a pencil, and the computer only shows up to help.

The last thing on screen is a Brantley character, finally moving.