Santa and the Three Bears (1970)

The director/writer/producer for this too-long special was Tony Benedict, and although any animation project is a collaborative effort I feel pretty safe in laying all of the problems I have with this one directly at his feet.  This was his first directorial effort after having been a long-time writer for Hannah-Barbera.  He would go on to be a writer and storyboard artist through the 80’s and 90’s for numerous shows including ‘Pandemonium,’ a random Saturday morning cartoon show that aired 13 episodes in 1982 and sank into the culture without a trace but which has been lodged in the back of my brain ever since.

This amount of artistic effort is indicative.

The one, singular, overwhelming problem with this special is its length.  At a whopping 44 minutes without the live action wraparounds (which we will address later) this special is easily twice the length of time that it needs to be as it has functionally less story than most seven-minute shorts.  This is the first time I’ve seen animation that has the same problems as most aggressively amateur live-action films: shots that last too long, lethargic editing, redundant and pointless scenes, and so, so much padding.  They also establish things multiple times that barely needed establishing the first time.

Let’s take the first five minutes of the actual animation.  We open on a very strange tracking shot, a window frame held dead center with the camera placed as if it’s outside facing in, except the scene through the window, seemingly the inside of some kind of toyshop, is moving from left to right.  This is exactly as confusing as it sounds. After a very abrupt transition we are following a man who turns out to be a park ranger as he rides a little scooter through the woods, coming across various animals who in no way factor into the rest of the special.  He eventually greets a mama bear and her two cubs as they prepare for the coming winter, and here’s where I would complain about the lack of a consistent world where it’s unclear which animals can talk to humans and which can’t and what kind of societies exist for the various species except these four characters are literally the only ones in the entire special so there’s no actual world for any of this to come into conflict with.  After some not especially clever banter we transition to the ranger in his winter cabin deciding to go out and cut down a Christmas tree.  After a full 22 second sequence of wordless pans of various shots of a snowy forest (something that will be repeated at basically every scene transition going forward) he again runs into the mama bear and her cubs and the previous conversation is essentially repeated.

Which is to say that the entire opening five minutes is completely pointless.  The introduction of the ranger and the cubs is instantly repeated, none of the animals shown ever appear again, and the information conveyed establishing their relationships is duplicated at the six-minute mark and will be continually underlined over the course of the special.

The premise of the special is that upon learning of the existence of Christmas the bear cubs want to stay awake and experience the holiday, much to the annoyance of their mother.  In an of itself this is a decent premise.  What it is not is enough of a backbone to carry 44 minutes of narrative.  But in order to stretch it out we become captive witnesses to endless commutes.  The ranger cabin is quite a ways from the bear cave but we watch as characters wander back and forth no less than five individual times.  The bears cubs wander over and are told the story of Santa Claus.  They wander back to the cave whilst engaging in shenanigans.  The Mama bear goes to the cabin to complain to the ranger.  Then she goes back home.  Having agreed to the mama bear’s request to pretend to be Santa to finally get her cubs to go the hell to sleep the ranger heads towards the bears’ cave on Christmas Eve and we get our longest commute yet as the ranger struggles through a windstorm, and struggles, and struggles, and the whole thing takes an entire four and a half minutes before he finally takes shelter for the night.  I need to stress that instead of a simple scene transition for all of these we are not trusted to understand that time and space exist and thus we watch them trudge, walk, gambol, and otherwise make their way from one place to another in what seems like real time.

The entire thing ends with the ranger trapped in a remote cabin due to a snowstorm and the real Santa magically showing up for the cubs.  The ranger gets there directly afterwards to be amazed and the bears finally go to sleep happily.  It’s a nice enough sentiment but, again, I will remind you that this special runs an hour with commercials.

The only point of slight interest is a stylistic quirk of the special which I haven’t frequently seen.  It’s fairly infrequent and in a non-animation context I would chalk up as an effort to extend length through editing but as these are hand-drawn sequences they almost have to have been actual storyboarded decisions.  During various montages frames will appear at the top and bottom of the screen imposing aspect ratio changes on the shots, or individual sections of the screen will become isolated in squares or rectangles, with the rest of the screen being blotted out, then other images will appear in similar squares arranged in patterns, sometimes stationary and sometimes moving, all to no discernable effect or meaning.  They serve no narrative function and, again, in a live-action piece I would consider them an effort to extend the running time through editing.  Mix in some standard trippy 60’s-style nonsense imagery and I really start to wonder what people thought interested children in those days.

I struggle to fully express how draining the endless parade of low-quality animation is.  Many of the individual cells are fine, and even at their worst they meet the standard of a decent Hannah-Barbera short, but after the seventh set of slows pans across the same static backdrop you start to worry about the animators themselves.  This took them weeks.  They got up in the morning, went to work, sat at an easel for hours at a time, then went home and presumably had to justify what they did all day to themselves.  Did they curse Tony Benedict for his hubris?  Had they been lured to the production with promises of future, more ambitious projects?  This thing did get an inexplicable theatrical release of some sort since it was correctly rejected by the television networks.  I imagine Tony Benedict following along behind Herschell Gordon Lewis and trying to book this into the same theaters as ‘Miss Nymphet's Zap-In.’  This special is so boring I had to make my own fun.

Then there’s the live action bookends.  They are quite short, totaling around three minutes between the two halves, and the second bookend takes place after the animated credits have run in their entirety.  I’ll sum them up with the very polite description of ‘awkward.’  The opening segment consists of several random shots of Christmas decorations as well as a cat coiled amidst them, eventually focusing on two small children clearly related to someone on the production team.  A quite unhealthy-looking middle-aged man (played by Hal Smith, Otis the town drunk on “The Andy Griffith Show” and the original voice of Owl in Disney’s Winnie the Pooh, so well done for that I guess) wrapped in a thick robe and shoved into a stuffed chair offers to tell them a story, which comprises the special we subsequently watch.  After the credits have fully finished we come back to a clock showing the time as just after midnight, an unconscious cat, and sleeping children who get woken up by Otis to open presents since technically it’s Christmas day now and they are not going to wait any longer.

This one was a slog.  Aside from some interesting imagery at times it contained nothing of note.  It was long and drawn out and generally pointless.  I can’t say that if it had just been half an hour it would have been any good but it would certainly have been less painful.  If Tony Benedict did any kind of reflecting on his intentions with this special, what messages or themes he was trying to convey, they were either of the most mercenary kind or consisting of a kind of solipsistic madness that I hesitate to consider further.  This one was lost to the depths of time for a reason.