Disney Turns a Child's Doodle Into the Heart of Christmas 2025
Disney's "Best Christmas Ever" is a 2025 original animated short film directed by Academy Award winner Taika Waititi, voiced by Disney Legend John Goodman, and released on Disney+ on November 10, 2025, serving as the centrepiece of Disney's holiday campaign "Make Someone's Holiday Magic" across the United States.
The story is disarmingly simple and distinctly Disney in its construction. A young girl draws a doodle on Christmas Day, Santa mistakes the drawing for a holiday wish, and the doodle comes to life — voiced by John Goodman — sparking a friendship built entirely on imagination. That premise carries the campaign's emotional payload: the idea that the most meaningful holiday gestures are acts of creative generosity rather than commercial transaction. As Taika Waititi described it, the film is set firmly in the world of a child, with a girl and her new best friend navigating life together through friendship and imagination alone.
The campaign sits within a broader strategic platform Disney calls "Make Someone's Holiday Magic," which also functions as the short film's closing call to action. In the United States, where Disney+ competes directly with streaming rivals for subscriber attention during the highest-traffic entertainment window of the year, the campaign does more than generate seasonal warmth — it positions Disney as the custodian of a particular kind of holiday narrative: multi-generational, rooted in wonder, and inseparable from the Disney storytelling canon. Joanna Balikian, Senior Vice President of Brand Management at Disney, described the intent as capturing the timeless spirit of friendship, family, and imagination that brings generations together. The short was created with agency adam&eveDDB, produced by Hungryman and Untold Studios, and animation-advised by Eric Goldberg of Walt Disney Animation Studios — the animator who created Genie in Aladdin (1992).
Disney structures its holiday campaigns around narrative continuity rather than standalone advertising events. "Best Christmas Ever" is the second consecutive Disney holiday short directed by Taika Waititi and created with adam&eveDDB, following the Emmy-nominated "The Boy & The Octopus" in 2024, as confirmed by The Walt Disney Company's own reporting. That continuity is a deliberate platform decision: by returning to the same director, the same agency, and the same tonal register, Disney signals to audiences in the United States that the annual holiday short is a reliable creative appointment rather than a one-off promotional gesture.
The strategic rationale connects directly to competition. In the United States, Disney+ operates in a crowded subscription video-on-demand environment where competitors including Netflix and Amazon Prime Video also invest heavily in original holiday content to drive engagement and reduce churn during the fourth quarter. The global SVOD subscriber base stood at approximately 339 million in mid-2025, with year-over-year growth of around nine and a half percent, according to Señal News — a market dynamic that makes retention-focused content investment increasingly critical for every major platform. For Disney, a short film that travels organically through social sharing and editorial coverage generates media value that extends well beyond the Disney+ platform itself.
The consumer insight animating the campaign is straightforward: holiday advertising that centres a child's perspective and foregrounds imagination rather than product acquisition tends to generate stronger emotional resonance and longer recall in adult audiences. Disney's brand equity is uniquely positioned to execute on that insight because the studio's legacy content — from Aladdin to the Marvel films — already occupies the emotional memory of the parents and grandparents who sit alongside children when holiday content is consumed. The campaign does not need to introduce Disney to its audience. It needs only to remind that audience why the brand matters during the moments that matter most.
Taika Waititi directs "Best Christmas Ever" with the same tonal sensibility he applied to "The Boy & The Octopus" in 2024 — warmth without sentimentality, humour without deflation, and a consistent trust in the child's point of view as the most honest vantage point for a holiday story. His direction is credited across multiple trade sources including Marketing Week, shots.net, and Creative Salon, all of which note his sustained creative partnership with Disney and adam&eveDDB across consecutive holiday campaigns.
The voice cast adds immediate cultural weight. John Goodman, a Disney Legend, voices the character of Doodle — the girl's animated companion who springs from her Christmas drawing. Molly Cartwright voices the girl, as confirmed by shots.net and IMDB. That pairing, a recognisable and beloved adult voice embodied in a hand-drawn character that belongs entirely to a child's imagination, is a precise creative choice: it makes the Doodle feel simultaneously familiar and new, grounded in Disney heritage yet invented fresh on the page.
The animation itself draws directly on that heritage. Eric Goldberg, the Walt Disney Animation Studios animator responsible for creating the Genie in Aladdin (1992), served as animation adviser on the production, collaborating with Untold Studios and production company Hungryman. Goldberg's involvement is not incidental — it anchors the short's hand-drawn aesthetic in the studio's own classical tradition, distinguishing it visually from the CGI dominance of contemporary animated content. Adam&eveDDB's Chief Creative Officers Antony Nelson and Mike Sutherland oversaw the creative, as reported by televisual.com and mediapost.com, working in partnership with a production pipeline that spans London and Los Angeles. The result is a short film that feels crafted rather than produced — a distinction that carries strategic weight in an era of content abundance.
No third-party verified performance metrics — such as view counts, completion rates, or subscriber attribution figures — for "Best Christmas Ever" are publicly available at the time of writing. What is documentable is the structural effectiveness of the platform from which the campaign emerges. The predecessor film, "The Boy & The Octopus" (2024), received an Emmy nomination, as confirmed by The Walt Disney Company's own published record. That recognition is an externally verifiable signal of creative quality and industry standing, and it sets a high baseline against which "Best Christmas Ever" is implicitly measured.
In the United States, the campaign launched on November 10, 2025 — a timing decision that positions the short at the opening of the high-attention holiday window, ahead of Thanksgiving and the peak December streaming period. That release strategy maximises organic sharing potential and editorial coverage duration, extending the campaign's earned media life across the full holiday season rather than concentrating it in a single December week.
Clapboard rates "Best Christmas Ever" at 79 out of 100. That score reflects the campaign's strengths — a distinctive creative voice, a coherent multi-year platform strategy, exceptional production pedigree, and a narrative architecture that serves both the brand and the audience simultaneously — alongside the inherent difficulty of measuring a short film campaign whose primary currency is cultural presence rather than direct-response conversion. The campaign's greatest structural asset is its repeatability: Disney has demonstrated, across two consecutive years, the capacity to deliver holiday short films of awards-calibre quality, which is a durable competitive advantage in a media category where most holiday advertising is forgotten by Boxing Day.
"Best Christmas Ever" is a Disney original animated short film released on November 10, 2025. It premiered on Disney+ and online as the centrepiece of Disney's "Make Someone's Holiday Magic" holiday campaign in the United States, directed by Taika Waititi and voiced by John Goodman as the character Doodle.
Taika Waititi directed "Best Christmas Ever" for Disney in 2025. An Academy Award winner for Best Adapted Screenplay for Jojo Rabbit (2019), Waititi also directed the Emmy-nominated Disney holiday short "The Boy & The Octopus" in 2024, making this his second consecutive seasonal collaboration with Disney and adam&eveDDB.
Adam&eveDDB created the "Make Someone's Holiday Magic" campaign for Disney. The London-based agency worked with Chief Creative Officers Antony Nelson and Mike Sutherland on the project, partnering with production company Hungryman, animation studio Untold Studios, and animation adviser Eric Goldberg of Walt Disney Animation Studios.
The short follows a young girl whose hand-drawn doodle comes to life on Christmas Day after Santa mistakes the drawing for a holiday wish. John Goodman voices the Doodle character and Molly Cartwright voices the girl. The film ends with the campaign tagline and call to action: "Make Someone's Holiday Magic."
"Best Christmas Ever" is the direct sequel to Disney's 2024 holiday short "The Boy & The Octopus," which received an Emmy nomination. Both films were directed by Taika Waititi and created with adam&eveDDB, establishing a multi-year Disney holiday short platform rather than a series of isolated annual campaigns.
Disney's "Best Christmas Ever" received a Clapboard Score of 79 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong creative pedigree, coherent platform strategy, and production quality — including Eric Goldberg's animation advisory role — while acknowledging that primary performance metrics for the 2025 United States campaign are not yet publicly verified.
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