By Andy Ihnatko

November 24, 2023 8:26 AM PT

Ihnatko: Deconstructing Apple’s weirdly empathetic “Fuzzy Feelings”

Apple released its annual holidaytime videofun thingy! Hooray!

Don’t read this until after you’ve watched it. (Note to Apple Watch users: if your device starts lighting up with emergency medical alerts while you’re watching, just ignore them. Your grinchy heart is just growing three sizes in response to holiday sentiment and the sensors are misinterpreting that data as atrial fibrillation.)

OK. Pretty cool short, eh? The lady is shooting stop-motion animation with her iPhone, apparently using an app on her MacBook that takes advantage of the iPhone 15 Pro’s ability to shoot pictures in tethered mode. Over the course of four minutes, warm fuzzies are had. Almost literally. It’s all neat stuff and I sincerely applaud everybody involved in its creation.

A couple of things bothered me about the short, though.

First: I wish someone at Apple would explain to me on the record why the lady’s boss wasn’t played by Paul Giamatti. It’s such a total Paul Giamatti role that if Apple had produced this short inside the EU, some regulatory agency or another would have required Apple to hire Giamatti for the gig, no substitutes. In 2008, when Samsung cloned the iPhone with so much fidelity that it lit the fuse for years of vicious lawsuits, Samsung didn’t do that job nearly as well as how well Apple cloned Paul Giamatti when they booked this other actor.

Second: Something about the lady’s behavior nagged at me. The feeling lingered all afternoon and it took me a while to figure out what the issue was.

The story is short and simple. A lady suffers under an abrasive, if not fully abusive, boss. She exorcises her workplace anger through the ancient Klingon blood rite known as “stop-motion needle-felt animation.”

If you think about it, that’s absolutely stone-cold. Imagine if, instead, she took out her frustrations about her boss by drawing single-panel comics on her iPad. Each of her fantasy scenarios of her boss being injured, and humiliated, and, overall, deliberately made to feel as if God has turned His gaze of love far away from him, would have taken her twenty minutes to draw, max.

But stop-motion animation? With needle-felted figures?

How many weeks did it take her to complete just one of those humiliating scenes? She designed and constructed dolls, props, and sets; she invested lots of money and ingenuity in doing the lighting and rigging; she animated each shot one painstaking frame at a time; and then did all of the editing.

You must agree with me that this is an utterly psychopathic amount of work. It’s very correct to witness this behavior and then fear for that man’s safety out in the real world.

I’ll also point out that one of the little things the boss did that annoyed and angered her was that he noticed that she was very late for work. He communicated his disappointment in a quick, low-key way that drew no attention from the rest of the office. Close examination of the previous scene reveals why she was late that morning: she’d gotten so wrapped up in her whole Torture My Boss By Wooly Proxy project that she’d lost all track of time. She didn’t even leave her house for the office until five minutes before nine.

This speaks poorly of her. But it’s not the thing about the short that nagged at me all afternoon. It was the weird and fitful role of empathy in the story.

Scene: the boss makes the rounds of the office. In a manner that could be described either as “self-conscious and awkward” or “exactly how Paul Giamatti would have played that scene,” he hands out personal holiday gifts to the entire staff. The lady unwraps an utterly charming Christmas stocking that her boss clearly knitted himself.

Next, she happens to spot him dining alone, in a restaurant otherwise filled with groups and couples celebrating the holiday.

These two experiences help to humanize the boss in the lady’s eyes. She softens. The short ends with her starting to regard the man with fresh empathy and understanding.

OK. That’s sweet. Really. For the purposes of a four-minute short, it’s an efficient and effective story arc.

But the story dismisses something of critical importance: why didn’t she humanize her boss before the she learned that he was a fellow fan of the fiber arts? The boss was deserving of empathy and understanding from birth, because he’s a felllow human being. And yet the lady began extending that dignity to him just recently, and only because she chanced to see him eating alone and then she pitied him.

She got there in the end, which we should celebrate, but if not for the fact that only the ineffable forces of the universe have the right to judge, I’d be giving her, like, a B. Plus a fun sticker, because it keeps everything positive.

The messaging here is weird. On a side note, I also wonder: is the root of the problem between these two a simple generational difference in emotional user interfaces?

The boss isn’t mean to her. OK: not holding the elevator for her is a jerk move. But overall, he just seems like one of those people who are closed-off with his feelings overall. That sort of thing can easily come across as gruff. But is there anything to the trope of Millennials and Gen-Z requiring consistent emotional affirmations in the workplace, forms of reassurance that their Boomer bosses aren’t equipped to dispense?

Well, whatever. Empathy is the point of today’s sermon. Empathy requires each of us to never ever forget that we should treat fellow humans like human beings and not human-shaped objects. No exceptions and no excuses.

Simple? Oh, sure. But holy cats, it’s hard to get a consistent grip on the thing, isn’t it? It’s easier to know that we’ve misplaced our empathy than it is to be sure of what we should do with it.

The struggle’s worth it, though. Empathy is hands-down our most significant and important function. God or whatever put us here to practice empathy, and also because He or whatever couldn’t figure out how to make a huge awesome island made out of fun colorful plastic show up in the middle of the ocean all on its own.

So when the lady in the “Fuzzy Feelings” video exercises her empathy only conditionally, after she comes to pity her boss (itself a form of dehumanization), it comes across as… well, not wrong, but definitely odd.

Empathy from the machine

I’ve given “Fuzzy Feelings” another close examination and I might have an explanation for all of this. The computers in the short are big clues. Obviously, the lady uses a sweet setup of Apple computers at home. At work, her desk seems to have a Windows machine. Whatever it is, it definitely isn’t anything manufactured by Apple. The keyboard and mouse are ergonomic, for a start.

Apple has a famous and somewhat silly policy about using its products as props in film: Macs and iPhones and iPads can never be in the hands of any of the bad guys. I’m not kidding. Apple is so fussy about this that one of my favorite recent movies had to resort to a downright comical piece of editing when the story required a bad guy to hand an iPad to a good guy.

So maybe the lady’s capacity for empathy is intact… but her ability to access it is influenced by her environments. When she’s in the office and her boss gives her a gentle rebuke for a legit HR infraction, her proximity to a Microsoft operating system influences her to choose a path of (needle-felted stop-motion) violence. When she’s at home, her heart is warmed by the benedictive greenhouse of Apple screens, and empathy blossoms. She performs a penance: the Needle-Felted Boss, which throughout its life had been a sinner in the eyes of a vengeful God and made to suffer daily judgments more fearful than he could comprehend, receives a new blessing from his Lord, in the form of a felty little dog.

Also a pair of replacement pants. That puppet was animated without his trousers for way more scenes than the need for shot-to-shot continuity would require.

Can we just agree that “Fuzzy Feelings” is a little bit weird?

[Andy Ihnatko is a contributor to WGBH Radio and co-host of MacBreak Weekly. He's written about technology for numerous publications, including the Chicago Sun-Times, Macworld, and MacUser.]

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