Two Christmas Film Selections

I realize that the day is nearly upon us so it’s too late to give a list of my favorite children’s Christmas shows, but I’d still like to throw in two cents or so about a couple that stand out in my mind. I’ll mostly thereafter be taking off the rest of the week-happy Christmas, everyone!

A Charlie Brown Christmas


This has been a classic since it first aired in 1965, so I don’t suspect that many readers have not seen, let alone heard of, this one. I still wanted to mention it, though, because it consistently ranks as my favorite Christmas film, for kids or adults. This was the first of a great many Peanuts films, all created by Bill Melendez (for a bit of background on him you can look at this entry I posted when he passed away a few months ago), and it is in my estimation the best. There are aesthetic reasons for this--I think it was the freshest, as the creators were just figuring things out like what each character’s voice should sound like (a tricky job when converting a strip to animation; see Garfield and Dilbert for other examples of varying degrees of success), what the animation should look like (a bit freer and more transgressive, to my eye, than it later became when budgets went down), and, perhaps most importantly, the music--Vince Guaraldi’s score, with its vamp on his now-standard “Linus and Lucy,” is much looser and improvisational than the music became in later installations.

But above all of these qualities is the film’s theological stance. Christmas, it seems, has a tendency to be diluted in seasonal films and television specials. I’m all for Santa Claus and fully support the non-Christian trappings that come with the holiday as long as they’re put into proper perspective (especially for children) and made subservient to focusing on the birth and life of Christ, which is the point of the holiday regardless of its origins. So A Charlie Brown Christmas is remarkable--even radical--in how it achieves that focus within the milieu of childhood concerns, formal traditions like holiday decorations, and even, or especially, Charlie Brown’s quasiagnostic search for the true meaning of Christmas within that setting. His quest is not that unusual for the genre, but Linus’s response is. We don’t expect Linus to actually give him the true meaning of Christmas, not the real one that you discuss with your family, Bibles open, on Christmas Eve with the television turned firmly off. But that’s exactly what he does: give it to you, and, thankfully, your children, straight up without any cinematic flourishes or, worse, theological hedging. I’ve often thought of this film in terms of director Paul Schrader’s doctoral dissertation Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (1972), which, in short, posits that the most effective way to reveal the transcendent in motion pictures is to create a setting of pared down sparsity--think of the nonexistent pageant, Charlie Brown’s ennui and especially his shabby Christmas tree--and then insert a moment of abundance without any mundane explanation--that, in this case, is Linus’s recitation of Luke 2. What makes this film particularly striking, even in comparison with the masterpieces analyzed by Schrader (Dreyer’s Ordet, for instance, is one of my all-time favorite films), is the fact that the abundance is delivered through a particularly sparse means and consists of nothing more than the words of the King James Version. It speaks to the inimitable power of the scriptures, I think, as the ultimate source of the revelation of the divine save for a direct revelation itself. Using the scriptures in this way is one of the most powerful means available for motion pictures to approach the divine, but it must be couched in an appropriate narrative structure, as with Charlie Brown, to not come off as pedantic or, on the other hand, saccharine.

Robbie the Reindeer

I shan’t say as much about the three Robbie the Reindeer films (only the first two of which I’ve seen), by England’s Comic Relief in conjunction with the BBC. These films will work well with older children but not so much the under-six crowd, I suspect (last year at three Loretta was mystified and quickly bored). For anyone who wants to tickle their dry British wit, however, they're incredible fun, if not exactly too festive. To summarize the series, Robbie is Rudolph's unlucky son--unlucky because how do you live up to the stature of a father like that--who comes to join Santa's reindeer team, only to encounter his father's former nemesis, the maniacal Blitzen (making him a villain is pure genius). The three films are Robbie the Reindeer in Hooves of Fire (1999), a Chariots of Fire spoof centering around the Reindeer Games, Robbie the Reindeer in Legend of the Lost Tribe (2002), which involves that old Christmas standby of vikings named Magnus, and Robbie the Reindeer in Close Encounters of the Herd Kind (2007), which of course is a sci-fi spoof. 

The first two films are available in the US on a single DVD. Be sure to select the British voices before playing the films. The American cast, featuring Ben Stiller and Britney Spears, does an admirable job of dubbing over the British version, but the freshness is lost. It's an entirely different task to record your performance for a cartoon that has yet to be animated than to record your voice exactly over the timing of a previous performer and still try to sound fresh and genuine; those who perform the latter task inevitably suffer artistically. So there is that to consider, plus the authenticity of the original performances and the fact the script was written for British voices. This, by the way, is why one should always read subtitles rather than listen to a dubbed film. Both versions thankfully retain Steve Coogan's fantastic performance as Blitzen, because even in America our villains should always be British. 

Even if you miss it this Christmas season, Robbie is sufficiently accessible all year round.