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.
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