I really enjoyed this year’s holiday film from Apple. It was actually suprisingly subversive at the start, wasn’t it? Our protagonist is shown creating a stop-motion film featuring a downtrodden grump falling victim to any number of calamities… using Apple hardware.

But she’s using her gear for evil! Because it turns out these films are the outlet for her frustrations with her actual boss, who treats her (and presumably, everyone else in her dismal office) with contempt.

And that’s the arc of the story. As time passes, our protagonist realizes that the grump is actually just lonely; her bitterness thaws and melts. She turns her stop-motion superpowers to good: giving the felt grump a new puppy (which caused me to burst into tears right there, not gonna lie), and then in real life, joins him for lunch.

Yeah, it’s just an ad for the wealthiest company in the world. But they spent some of that money to send a message: that we project out to the world the pain we feel inside. If we can see the humanity in each others’ hearts, we can turn pain into love.

That’s what elevates an ad into art.