Christmas in Tattertown (1988)

              By the time of this cartoon Christmas animated television specials had been a part of mainstream culture for over 25 years.  If anything, the idea of standalone specials unconnected to larger properties was on its way out.  If you were lucky you’d get a special Christmas adaptation of something that already existed or a Christmas pilot setting up a longer set of episodes.  That’s what happened with ‘Christmas in Tattertown.’  In 1988 Nickelodeon commissioned ‘Tattertown’ as its first piece of original animation.  Previously they had licensed cartoons and other programs from within the MTV network ecosystem or, for it’s Nick at Nick block, whoever owned the rights to the various classic sitcoms it aired.  They approached Ralph Bakshi, who at the time was overseeing ‘Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures’ for CBS, to develop something for them and he revisited an idea he’d been working on since high school.

This is just not the title card of something originally meant as a Chriastmas special.

I could spend a whole lot of time detailing the history of Ralph Bakshi but let’s just hit the highlights.  After running into several roadblocks in the animation field through the 50’s and early 60’s, frustrated by the politics and corporate shuffling that kept him from making the kind of cartoons he wanted, Bakshi went independent in the late 60’s.  He worked on a few interesting television projects like the original Spider-Man cartoon before starting an ambitious run of adult oriented films.  This included ‘Fritz the Cat’ and an unfinished adaptation of ‘The Lord of the Rings.’  I’m skipping a whole lot here.  Bakshi included sex, drugs, profanity, and examinations of societal ills such as police brutality and racism, and not in particularly subtle ways. 

Eventually in the mid-80’s he found himself pitching ideas to CBS and they bit on a new version of Mighty Mouse.  Bakshi came up with the idea out of desperation at the end of an otherwise unproductive meeting, claiming he held the rights, which he did not.  After selling it to the executives he furiously researched who did own the rights and learned that it was CBS itself.  As he would later brag, he sold them their own property.  The cartoon was important for any number of reasons, not least of which it provided a career boost for artists such as Doug Moench, Bruce Timm, and, well, John Kricfalusi.  It’s been heralded as the beginning of the 90’s revolution in quality television animation.  There’s a very strong argument to be made that without Bakshi’s ‘Mighty Mouse’ there would have been no ‘Batman: the Animated Series,’ ‘Tiny Toon Adventures,’ or ‘Finding Nemo.’ 

Having Bakshi, with his deliberately provocative filmography, as such a prominent member of production on a Saturday morning cartoon for kids was not without its problems. Any number of conservative organizations were actively looking for reasons to protest his involvement and he did not make it particularly hard for them.  In the now infamous episode ‘The Littlest Tramp’ Mighty Mouse crushes a flower into powder and inhales it.  Before the episode even aired various members of the production flagged it as possibly being too close to snorting cocaine.  It was variously taken out and included before being explicitly cleared by CBS management and airing.  It went largely unnoticed on its initial broadcast.  A full eight months later the concerned citizens of the American Family Association accused the cartoon of promoting drug use, and despite Bakshi’s protests that it was nothing of the sort he did agree to remove the images from future broadcasts, which the AFA claimed proved they were right.  CBS issued a statement supporting the team and then cancelled the series.

Unfortunately for Baskshi this controversy hit during production of the pilot for ‘Tattertown’ and Nickelodeon bailed on the series.  The completed pilot was retitled ‘Christmas in Tattertown’ and aired on December 21, 1988 during the Nick at Night programming block.  The series was pitched as 39 episodes and would have premiered in 1989.  Instead the first set of original Nicktoons wouldn’t appear until the middle of 1991, with ‘Doug,’ ‘Rugrats,’ and Kricfalusi’s ‘The Ren & Stimpy Show.’ 

The basic concept of ‘Tattertown’ is one that Bakshi had been working on since he’d been a teenager: a place where everything discarded by the rest of society ends up.  Originally called ‘Junktown,’ it’s where objects and ideas that society no longer deems useful go when everyone decides they’re not needed anymore.  This would have allowed the show to comment on basically any segment of society that the writers could think up and also allow for a wider breadth of animating styles since there’s no reason to develop a homogenized look if it could draw from all of animation history.  This is indicated in the special by mixing very old techniques such as using all key frames with relatively modern techniques like smear frames.  They integrated an older 30’s aesthetic with updated 70’s and 80’s references.  It also hearkened back to very old animated shorts by giving everything, from telephone poles to trees to the narrating saxophone voiced by Keith David, the ability to spout some eyes and walk around at any moment.

Even though every source online agrees that this was produced as the pilot for the eventual series it’s not really structured like the kind of pilot episode we’ve gotten used to.  For most of the running time all of the characters seem to be familiar with each other and the ongoing narrative.  The first minute and forty-five seconds seems to be a rushed encapsulation of what I’d normally consider the plot of a pilot episode.  Narrating saxaphone Keith David explains that once there was a girl named Debbie who had two dolls, a dog and Miss Muffet.  They get sucked up into a book and arrive in Tattertown, which causes her dolls to come to life.  The dog, named Dog, snuffles along behind Debbie like always, but Muffet, reveling in her newfound agency, immediately runs away from Debbie, refusing to take part in any more dress-ups or tea parties.

The inclusion of Christmas in this special is fairly ornamental.  It’s more the b-plot than anything else.  The actual story of the special is the continued rebellion of Muffet.  She escapes from Debbie, declares herself Muffet the Merciless, and travels to The Deadster Zone, which is the next town over filled with “war toys and tvs and other unsavory characters.”  There she rules with an iron fist and eventually leads the dangerous toys on a full-on assault on Tattertown, which is foiled by their own stupidity and Debbie playing Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.”

This is because during the a-plot Debbie semi-randomly decides to teach the citizens of Tattertown what Christmas is all about.  She finds a cigar-selling Christmas wreath, persuades a Yiddish-speaking, bookstore-owning tree to act as a Christmas tree, and converts a couple of Muffet’s thugs to act as ornaments.  Despite her best efforts, which aren’t all that great, the townspeople still don’t understand anything she’s talking about.  She plays “White Christmas” at them in a final desperate effort.  Instantly everyone in town is overcome with emotions, forming perfect little Christmas scenes, and when Muffet’s flying spider drops her due to his own tears Muffet ends up in Tattertown jail, where Debbie celebrates all the fun they’re going to have together.

There’s a lot going on here, and unlike a lot of the other specials, where I had to dig in to figure out the socio-political implications might be, it’s all out in the open here.  This is not subtle commentary.  When Debbie and company first wander into the tree-owned bookstore a talking magazine from 1935, sporting a variation on the United State Eagle with the letters NRA emblazoned beneath it on the cover, falls open and a little montage ensues showing a brief scene at a USO tour, a mobster robbing a bank, a G-Man complete with badge shooting a machine after him before producing a plate of spaghetti and intoning, “I love Italian food.”  When Muffet addresses her assembled troops she does so in front of a massive flag, aping the famous scene from ‘Patton.’  The quote above describing The Deadster Zone equating war-toys and television is about as subtle as any messaging in the special.

And that includes the not-very-subtle portrayal of Debbie as an absolute terror to her dolls.  She refuses to allow Muffet to exist independently of her, constantly chasing her in a very Roadrunner / Coyote way, and she is not the Roadrunner.  Dog, the dog, is always hanging off of her to her constant annoyance and abuse.  On the other hand whatever sympathies we might have for Muffet are offset by her being utterly unfazed by henchman Sidney the Spider attempting to kidnap a child doll and describing her as his “proud beauty.”  At one point she passes Santa in the sky (a Santa who pointedly does not stop to wish Christmas cheer to the citizens of Tattertown) and instantly moves to attack him.  There are no good people in this show.

A criticism that’s often made about Bakshi is that while it’s clear he’s very passionate about his work and definitely has a point of view it’s hard to say what that point of view actually is.  Some of it is very clear, such as his deep distrust and often hatred of authority figures, especially the police, his general anti-war stance, and his sympathy for the underclasses, especially lower-class women and minorities.  However, this tends to clash with his deep, deep cynicism, which causes him to view those who act on any sincere beliefs he may well share as naïve and ineffectual at best and easily coopted at worst.

This means that a lot of things that I would point to as internal contradictions or oddities in other specials, how Debbie is oddly unsympathetic for a main character, how everyone, both good and bad guys, are often smoking on screen,  how characters in what is supposed a Christmas special commit actual suicide when the war toys start killing each other, are all conscious decisions by Bakshi and the other creatives.  The craziness isn’t something buried in the subtext that I’m digging out and examining, it’s all out there right on the surface.  You’re supposed to notice these things.

Does that make it any good?  It’s certainly interesting.  If you’ve seen ‘Mighty Mouse: the New Adventures’ it’s a very similar style: huge, exaggerated movements, a lot of yelling, a lot of choppy animation where the movement isn’t particularly smooth but you do understand what’s going on, a very Tex-Avery style of mayhem and violence, and a constant flow of visuals gags and pratfalls.  The line between this and cartoons like ‘Tiny Toon Adventures’ is a pretty straight one.  That being said, having no sympathetic carriers and being so deeply cynical does keep it from connecting in any real way and the tossed-in nature of the Christmas plot doesn’t particularly help.  If you’re a fan of Bakshi’s it’s absolutely essential viewing, and if you grew up in the 90’s and want to see where all of your favorite series came from it’s incredibly revealing.  But it’s not a real Christmas special and marketing it as such was basically just a way for Nickelodeon to save face after folding to the very mild pressure from the AFA.  Baskhi has made noises about a DVD release but that’s never going to happen.  It used to occasionally be shown in syndication but it seems unlikely it’ll ever be made available outside of some niche streaming service.  Like so many of his other productions I’m torn between thinking Bakshi got a raw deal and wondering how anyone of his sensibilities could possibly have done any better working inside the machine that is Hollywood.

Christmas Every Day (1986)

               William Dean Howells was a writer who lived from 1837 to 1920.  He started his career at the Ohio State journal where he wrote poems and short stories.  He was also editor of The Atlantic Monthly from 1871 to 1881.  He became a novelist in 1872, his best-known work being The Rise of Silas Lapham.  He was a proponent of artistic Realism, a movement that arose in opposition to Romanticism.  As the name implied this was an emphasis on realistic, naturalistic portrayals of people and their lives without extreme artifice or dramatization.  This has some obvious political implications in drawing attention to existing societal ills, but it gradually grew calcified in its structures and forms, became closely identified with bourgeois interests, and eventually gave rise to Modernism in opposition.  In the works of Howells this realism included railing against what he saw as injustices such as the trials put on in the wake of the Haymarket Riots and the US annexation of the Philippines.  He was close friends with such other writers as Henry James and Mark Twain and wrote Abraham Lincoln’s 1960 campaign biography.  In 1892 he published a collection of children’s stories called Christmas Every Day and Other Stories Told for Children.   This included the title story on which this special is based.

              The story is fairly short and is presented to us as a father being pestered into telling a story to his young daughter.  Half of the fun of the story is the daughter absolutely bullying her father and him using his storytelling to gently tease her back.  We get next to no concrete details about either of the characters but from their back-and-forth banter and some flourishes in the writing we get a very good picture of a demanding but adorable daughter and a doting and clever father.  Thus we get the story itself and then a story on top of that about what the father is attempting to do by telling his daughter this story in this way.

              The daughter insists on being told a Christmas story, and after initially objecting the father agrees.  He tells the tale of a little girl who writes a series of letters to the Christmas Fairy wishing that it be Christmas every day.  Eventually the fairy agrees that it shall be so for an entire year.  The day after Christmas is also Christmas, as is the day after that, and the day after that.  The father details how the world is quickly sick of Christmas but must carry on celebrating it anyways.  The forests become depopulated in the search of decorative trees, the cost of turkeys and cranberries skyrocket, the economy becomes entirely gift-based causing rampant poverty, and other holidays are trampled in the wake of the all-conquering Christmas.  The little girl begs the fairy to reverse the wish to no avail.  Eventually she’s found out by everyone else for making the wish and shunned.  At last the year ends and the fairy asks if she’s like to make it Christmas every day forever.  Having learned her lesson the girl asks that it go back to just once a year and the fairy agrees.  The daughter is happy with her story and she and her father go have breakfast.  It’s a very charming little tale.

              Airing in December 1986 on CBS, this adaptation of the story comes from Thea Flaum and Dick Orkin of Orkin-Flaum Productions.  The short-lived company would produce this special and one other, a 1988 adaptation of the Oscar Wilde short story ‘The Canterville Ghost.’  I have to admire their taste in literature, if nothing else.  It was co-directed by Monica Kendall and Ed Newmann, both of whom have fairly slim IMDB credits, mostly as animators or producers rather than directors.  In addition to the credited writer Marla Frumkin there are also four listed “story consultants,” which is odd considering that the bones of the story remain unchanged and only minor details were adjusted, most of which work fine.

              The art direction is interesting.  It’s clear they weren’t working with much of a budget and decided to lean into it, to I think mixed results.  The backgrounds are fairly crude but deliberately so, looking something like a well-done set of children’s drawings.  Everything is slightly askew and exaggerated but not in the usual cartoon way.  The characters move as if they were paper doll segments assembled together and the pieces moved separately between frames, which is how I suspect this was animated.  If you’re familiar with early Flash animations where the elements are simply shifted around but don’t change in size or warp themselves, you’ll get an idea of what I mean.  It's not an unpleasant aesthetic, something like a cartoon version of stop-motion, and this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it.  I’m sure there’s a term for this technique in the industry I’m completely unaware of.

              The biggest problem I have with the special is that it changes the story from something tossed-off by a mischievous dad to one presented by a father to his children about something that actually happened to their great grandmother Tilly in the late 19^th century.  Luckily their ancestor lived in the exact same house and had the exact same number of relatives so they could just reuse the models and backgrounds for the flashbacks.  I can understand the choice, it keeps it set in the same time period as the original, but nothing about this story needed to happen in 1892.  This tale is prompted by the youngest daughter wishing it could be Christmas every day, to which her parents respond in horror.  The story is then told explicitly as a cautionary tale, not just as a moral one.  This is never taken back, by the way, the Christmas fairy actually appears at the end of the special to do some magic.  This strips away that second layer of story I liked so much in the original, the interplay between the tale itself and why it was being told.  Here it’s just passing along family lore and a grim warning.

              They tweak some of the details, like instead of having to send letters to the Christmas Fairy she just happens to live inside a crystal castle ornament Tilly’s family owns, but for the most part they’re rather unimportant.  They add some specifics to the presents, how everyone keeps getting the same clothes and the same dolls day after day, including a multiplying puppy that eventually numbers in the hundreds.  The quasi-apocalyptic consequences of the compounding holidays are kept in and are pretty great.  We see massive deforestation, bulldozers clearing presents from thoroughfares, carolers croaking out festive cheer against their will, and the best is when Tilly is greeted at her birthday party with a Christmas song instead of Happy Birthday and absolutely loses it.

              There are another couple embellished details, like the exact nature of how everyone finds out that Tilly’s wish caused all of this or how she tries to run away from home when she can’t take the societal pressure, but it’s all basically the same story.  After society has essentially collapsed worldwide finally the second December 26^th hits and the horrific reign of Christmas is over.  Everyone is absolutely ecstatic.  They crush the presents, create massive bonfires of the decorations, dance joyously in the streets, and the father wraps it up with “And everyone of course forgave Tilly and never mentioned the incident again.”  This is a decent enough joke but it doesn’t really make up for the usual “and Christmas magic is real” ending.  The little girl finds the crystal castle owned by Tilly, starts to make the same wish, remembers the words her father told her, and wishes instead to be curled up in bed.  The fairy appears, floats her to her room, and then wishes the camera a merry Christmas and flies off into the night.  I didn’t need any of that.

              I’d like to point out that there’s at least one other adaptation in existence, a 1996 television movie made for The Family Channel.  It turns the story into a Christmas version of ‘Groundhog Day,’ where an asshole teenage boy makes that same wish and is forced to relive the same Christmas day over and over, which means it misses the entire point of the original.  The story is in the public domain so I can’t really think why they even bothered to name it the same thing or even acknowledge the influence since it’s not like they’d get sued for copyright infringement.  I did not watch the entire thing but merely scrubbing through it confirmed that it’s exactly as mid-90’s as you’d think such a thing would be.  The only reason it didn’t star one of the kids from ‘Home Improvement’ is that they couldn’t have afforded one.

              This is a nice little Christmas cartoon that had the courage to be a mostly straight adaptation of a very good Christmas story.  The biggest change they made was to set the framing device in modern day, and for once I won’t scold a special for being a story told to children by an adult since that was present in the original version.  Its strength lies entirely in its story, which luckily for them was in the public domain and works just as well now as it did when it was first published.  The usual availability statements apply and I’d say it’s solidly in the upper half of everything I’ve seen this season.

For Better or For Worse: The Bestest Present

              I genuinely want to invent time travel so I can take a copy of this back to 1979 and force Bill Keane to watch this over and over until he collapses to the floor in a crying heap and admits he doesn’t know the first thing about turning a daily comic into a holiday special.

              There’s a subgenre of film called ‘slow cinema.’  As the name implies it actively rejects what it considers the overly dramatic and narrative-focused typical Hollywood style to focus on more contemplative, observational works.  It places an emphasis on the everyday, the mundane, finding meaning in lives and actions less frequently recorded.  Some prominent examples include ‘Au Hasard Balthazar,’ ‘Memoria,’ and the one that recently topped the Sight and Sound top 100 list and got everyone talking, as was the entire point, ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.’  These movies take atypical subjects and examine the minutiae of their lives and the worlds they inhabit to find meaning in the smallest of spaces. 

              Somewhat related is the Japanese concept of ma, roughly the philosophical conception of the importance of negative space.  To steal from the wiki, “Ma is taken to refer to an artistic interpretation of an empty space, often holding as much importance as the rest of an artwork and focusing the viewer on the intention of negative space in an art piece.”  This is reflected in general culture as deliberate silences in conversations, the extra few moments after a formal bow to show the proper respect, it’s an absence of action that draws attention to itself in order to invite time for contemplation.  Most Americans are introduced to the concept in the Studio Ghibli films directed by Hayao Miyazaki.  If you’ve ever watched one of his movies and noticed a scene or a section where nothing happens for longer than seems usual this is an example of ma, of the film deliberately leaving space between actions so the characters and especially the audience can take a moment to process what’s happening.  The train ride Chihiro takes to the witch’s cottage in ‘Spirited Away.’  Satsuki and Mei waiting for the bus with Totoro in ‘My Neighbor Totoro.’  These are all carefully considered and deepen the impact of the rest of the movie.

              I’m not going to place the daily comic strip ‘For Better or For Worse’ up there with ‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn’ or ‘Howl’s Moving Castle,’ but it’s working in something like the same territory.  The strip was created, written, and illustrated by Lynn Johnston from 1979 to 2008.  It centered on a family roughly based on Johnston’s own living in a fictional suburb of Toronto.  Although basically your normal gag-a-day domestic comedy it did have ongoing storylines as it followed the lives of its characters, who aged as the years passed in roughly real time.  Characters introduced as children at the start of the strip had children of their own by the end.  The family’s dog, Farley, was fourteen when he was depicted as dying after rescuing one of the children, and the death stuck.  The intent of the strip was to portray a middle-class suburban family in something close to a realistic way without the soap opera shenanigans of a lot of other comics.  Nothing happened in the strip that couldn’t happen in real life.

              The world being the world this meant that simply including things that actually happen in real life caused some controversies.  The death of Farley caused a massive response, about a third of which Johnston later described as negative.  This was hardly a shock, they were probably braced for some kind of backlash to an animal dying on panel, the death of Bambi’s mom is still a cultural touchstone 80 years later, but apparently the sheer size of it still surprised them.  There was also the inclusion of a gay character in 1991 that touched off a huge controversy.  The story is ridiculously milquetoast by today’s standards: a friend of the character Michael, who were both teenagers at the time of publication, comes out as gay.  He tells his parents, who react badly.  His father kicks him out of the house, but the next day the parents apologize and welcome him back into the house.  That’s it, that’s the entire storyline.  It occasionally came up in subsequent strips and was referenced in dialogue but that really is the entire thing.  This was enough for 100 newspapers to refuse to run the strips and for Johnston to be nominated for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.  The past is a different country, and anyone who seriously tries to argue that we haven’t made any progress in the last thirty years genuinely doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

              Where this hooks up in my brain to the slow cinema movement and Japanese philosophical concepts is that most of this special is devoted to just depicting the life of a suburban family.  The opening credits are displayed over a montage of the mother Elly doing laundry, the daughter Elizabeth pretending to brush her stuffed bunny’s teeth, the son Michael complaining of a toothache, mundane stuff.  The first scene proper is Michael getting off the bus from school to start Christmas break, being momentarily annoyed that it’s raining instead of snowing, then spotting a puddle of water.  He starts to step around it, pauses and smirks to himself, then deliberately jumps into it, soaking himself.  This causes his mother to be annoyed at his wet shoes and tells him to put them by the radiator, which he grumbles at but does.  None of this comes up again but it does give a very good introduction to these characters and the family dynamics.  Which is good storytelling, but the question that I kept asking myself was: why did this story have to be animated?  And why does it work so well?

              The actual answer to the first question is that this was a popular cartoon property that they decided they could turn into an animated special for money, but I meant in a more general sense.  These exact same scenes could have been performed in live action, but I don’t think they would have had the same impact.  Going through the plot points none of this couldn’t have worked on an above-average sitcom of the time, although honestly the laugh track would have killed the mood.  Instead they wrote a script, storyboarded it out, then painstakingly drew the individual animations and assembled it together.  And it works, it really does, and I’m trying to figure out how much of it works because it’s animated. 

              One of the reasons that animated musicals have stuck around while more traditional musicals have struggled is arguably that cartoons involve both more and less suspension of disbelief.  A lot of people resist movie musicals because they argue they’re silly, it’s not realistic for characters to suddenly break out in song and dance.  As if all movies aren’t inherently ridiculous, even the slow cinema ones.  Cartoons are in the seemingly paradoxical position where, by being a series of drawings, they are so obviously fake that it requires more suspension of disbelief at the start, but once you’ve already accepted the unreality of a set of animations it requires less additional effort to also belief that they can burst into song whenever they feel like it.  I don’t think a movie version of ‘Cats’ was ever a good idea, but Spielberg’s proposed animated version would have been infinitely preferable to the mix of live action and CGI that we did get.  There’s a parallel argument to be made why live theater can also make musicals work that’s hard to replicate on screen, but that’s not what we’re talking about.

              This kind of cartoon, painstakingly animating the mundane, kind of uses the same principle but in reverse.  What would seem boring and ordinary in live action takes on a kind of extra reality when you see it animated.  You’ve already bought into this cartoon world and its characters so when they get annoyed, or tease each other, or otherwise act similar to how actual people behave in actual life, you identify all the more.  You’re not distracted by the fact that its actors, or the set dressing, or how you’re seen this setup a hundred times before, unless you are 100% resisting you’ve already bought what they’re selling.  Mind you, it can lose you just as quickly, I’ve sworn out loud several times at several of the cartoons I’ve watched recently, but if they’re got you they’ve got you.

              The story this special tells isn’t particularly groundbreaking.  The mom and the kids go Christmas shopping and the little girl loses her stuffed bunny.  It turns out it was made by her grandmother and is a family heirloom, so after the father gets home from work he goes back to the store to look for it but doesn’t find it.  We later see that it’s found by the store custodian while he’s cleaning up from the Christmas rush.  He’s shown as generally grouchy but not a bad guy, just sad that he’s alone on the holidays.  Michael, recognizing that his little sister is very sad, pesters his parents to put a reward notice in the newspaper, and the parents indulge him and do so, not expecting it to work.  The custodian sees the notice and mails back the bunny.  The parents are so happy they end up tracking down the old guy and inviting him over to Christmas dinner.  They end up having a wonderful time and the custodian is happy to have made new friends.  The end.

              This is sappy stuff, but as has so often been stated what matters isn’t what a story is about, it’s how it’s told, and this one is told very well.  Everything about the special is understated and, for a cartoon, realistic.  The parents do put in the effort to find the bunny but are also fairly quick to move on, banking on their daughter being young and able to forget.  Michael is lazy and bratty but not annoyingly so, and he loves his sister even while he messes with her.  The old custodian has a picture of his deceased wife that he absently talks to, which sure is a cliché but also softens him up nicely for the audience.  What would come across as a Very Special Episode of ‘Family Ties’ works better here because the characters are not mugging for a live studio audience and the camera doesn’t always have to be pointed at something dramatic.  It can focus on smaller moments like the parents having a quiet conversation at the dinner table or Michael wrestling with the dog. 

              It’s not perfect, there are a couple of songs that really don’t need to be in there, and while it’s cute that Johnston’s actual kids, Aaron and Katie, provided the voices for their cartoon counterparts you can tell they weren’t professionals.  The animation, done by Atkinson Film-Arts in conjunction with CTV Network, captures the style of the comic strip and gets you to connect with the characters.  Another six animated specials were produced in the 90’s including another Christmas story, ‘A Christmas Angel.’  That one implies the existence of actual angels and I’m very, very glad I didn’t have to try to justify that nonsense.  This one is currently tied with ‘Ziggy’s Gift’ for the nicest surprise this season and is up near the top of specials that I would recommend people actually watch during the holidays.