The Night Before Christmas (1968)

              The first thing I’d like to point out about this special is the above-average animation.  This was produced by Playhouse Pictures, a smaller animation studio based in Hollywood that employed names like Bobe Cannon and Bill Littlejohn, names that meant nothing to me but whose credits span basically the entire second half of 20^th century animation and definitely worked on something you’ve seen.  Playhouse Pictures did mainly commercial work, advertising or opening credits, and seem to have some connection to the 1984 Jim Carrey series ‘The Duck Factory.’  The overall style seems to be somewhere between Disney and Hannah-Barbera and is very 1960’s in a way I find hard to articulate.

The main problem with the special, which is generally fine in a way that’s hard to write much about at length, is that the premise doesn’t become clear until about fifteen minutes into the runtime.  It’s just fine when you do understand it but at no point in the entire first half does it indicate what the story is actually about.  It works much better on second viewing but that doesn’t help much when you’re a confused nine-year-old already annoyed that you’re not watching ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas.’  In essence it’s a fictionalized telling of the composition by Clement Clarke Moore of the poem ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas,’ better known as ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.’  It’s not shy about this, the opening title states “based on the life and verse of Clement Clark Moore,” but even in 1968 kids were not particularly well-versed on nineteenth century poets. 

Moore is a pretty interesting figure in and of himself, born into wealth as the son of a Bishop of the Episcopal Church and most known in his time as an eminent scholar and professor.  He inherited a large estate in New York called Chelsea, which after the expansion of New York City became the neighborhood named as such, and by selling that land Moore became incredibly wealthy.  He openly questioned the religious views of Thomas Jefferson, opposed the abolition of slavery, was a board member of the New York Institution of the Blind, and composed arguably the most well-known poem ever written by an American.  He’s shown in the opening few minutes giving a lecture and it’s more than a little likely that said lecture would have been against freeing the slaves.  The special doesn’t feel the need to really get into that.

The actual story behind the poem is rather mundane, having been written some time in 1822 or 1823 by Moore during either a series of shopping trips or during a visit to a relative, the stories vary.  First published in December 1823 anonymously, it was widely attributed to Moore before he finally claimed authorship in 1837.  His stated reason for not wanting to immediately acknowledge ownership was that he felt that writing such a poem was unbecoming for a man of his societal position.

The problem with starting the special without any of this backstory is that for most of the runtime it’s a well animated, nicely paced story about a random family doing various nineteenth century things with no sense of where any of it is going.  We open with the family performing some household chores and clearly getting ready for the upcoming Christmas before the father is suddenly off to give a series of lectures and a young girl is seen ostentatiously coughing.  She asks her father to buy her a book about St. Nicholas while he’s gone but although this is central to the story it’s barely given more emphasis than the other children asking for their own presents.  The father leaves, the girl takes ill, and none of it comes together until the father, having been unable to find a suitable book about St. Nicholas, returns home to find the girl delirious with pneumonia and muttering about Santa.  He swears to write a poem to make her feel better, proceeds to do so, and it finally all snaps together that this is what the story is about when the rest of the special is Moore reading the poem to his daughter while the special illustrates it for us.  The girl’s fever then breaks, no doubt because of the sick rhymes, and the family enjoys a happy Christmas morning.

There are really only two sequences of note, but they are very good sequences.  One is after the children have been put to bed and we get one of those random trippy montages that the 1960’s seemed to produce out of absolutely nowhere.  It’s decently integrated into the reality of the rest of the special by the camera dissolving into the patterns of the comforters on the children’s beds but we’ve still got swaying flowers with faces, bunny shenanigans, and random cherubs.  I’ve seen more disturbing imagery in children’s animations but it still comes rather out of nowhere.

The second is during the reading of the poem itself, which is done by a choir that changes the words of the poem in places to presumably scan better as lyrics.  Here we get the actions of the poem portrayed for the audience.  The entire sequence is given a much more cartoony feel than the rest of the special, with slapstick physics and big-eyed animals with clothes.  It’s a story being told to an explicitly delirious little girl which makes the fanciful imagery tonally a little odd, but I think it works.  At one point a mouse tucks her children into bed and then is flipped up into a stocking by the tail of a sleeping cat, that sort of thing.  The narrator as he appears in the story also has traditional exaggerated cartoon features not seen in the rest of the special, and of course since this is in-universe a story being told the Santa magic is presented as completely factual.  At the end of the sequence the girl is of course almost fully recovered and proclaims she had such a dream, although I do like that the next morning she’s still slightly ill and is carried around by her parents.  The cartoon is full of unnecessarily thought-out little touches like that.

That’s really about all there is to it.  Aside from an unclear premise there’s very little wrong with this special and there are a number of things it does right.  The fact that the story is almost entirely untrue, from the circumstances of the poem’s composition to the size of the family (three total children instead of the six he had at the time), is completely immaterial.  If we’re going down the road of ‘what were they trying to say with this special’ I think here we hit a fairly uninteresting cul-de-sac, I’m pretty sure they just thought this was an interesting story they could sell into perpetual syndication and were wrong.  Or maybe they just wanted to make children watch as worried adults huddled helplessly around the bed of a babbling, delirious little girl, it takes all kinds.  Any padding involves a cute dog or a cute kid so you don’t mind, the songs are decent enough for the time (although there’s a very ‘time filler between scenes of a Lawrence Welk special’ feel to them), and while there are anthropomorphized animals they are explicitly part of a child’s fever dream and therefore completely excusable.  If nothing else the Santa shown on screen isn’t the disturbingly mustache-free version from the Rankin Bass special ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.’  Never getting that imagery out of my head.