Santa (Brian Cox) fights his way through a snowstorm to deliver presents to the small British seaside town of Wellington-on-Sea, where the inhabitants are struggling to make Christmas happen despite being cut off from the rest of the country.
Given the low bar for most contemporary Christmas movies – does someone wear a plaid shirt? That’ll do – and the desperate need for material that isn’t totally hackneyed, one can see the appeal of adapting some children’s books by Richard ‘Love Actually’ Curtis. The resulting British animation is a little disjointed and meandering at times, but it’s also genuinely touching and, thank Santa, better than all those formulaic romcoms.
The material is drawn from three storybooks Curtis wrote with illustrator Rebecca Cobb: ‘That Christmas’, ‘The Empty Stocking’ and ‘Snow Day’. We open with Brian Cox’s Santa Claus struggling to deliver presents through inclement weather, before flashing back to a few days earlier when things started to get difficult. There’s unrequited love at a school play, absent parents stuck in the snow, one good twin concerned that her naughty twin sister won’t get any presents, and a bit about missing turkeys on the run.
It maybe needed just a touch more British eccentricity to truly become a classic.
This comes from Locksmith Animation, who made the slight but likeable Ron’s Gone Wrong. This has the same hallmarks: an over-qualified voice cast and a slight timidity in the character animation, as if they’re more keen to match DreamWorks or Pixar’s style than develop their own thing. Director Simon Otto and his team have largely ditched Cobb’s illustrations, on the basis that small black dots do not make sufficiently expressive eyes, but they’ve replaced those lively sketches with a generic design that has none of the eccentricity in the story detail or the voice work, and that’s a shame.
That said, the voices do help: Brian Cox makes for a determined but warm Santa, forever wanging on about his “job” and the difficulties thereof; Fiona Shaw always blends terrifying and touching well, and the kids of indeterminate age, especially Jack Wisniewski, Zazie Hayhurst and India Brown, are excellent. It all creates some lovely moments, particularly between Shaw’s Ms Trapper and Wisniewski’s lonely Danny, but it maybe needed just a touch more British eccentricity to truly become a classic.
The stories are all individually charming, but overly familiar animation and underwhelming character-design blunt the effect.