A Christmas Carol (1971)

              I’m wondering if there’s a more pervasive, retold story in Western civilization than ‘A Christmas Carol.’  We have a few definitive versions of it by this point, whether you want it told straight (the 1951 film starring Alastair Sim) or comedically (1992’s ‘The Muppet Christmas Carol’) or animatedly (1983’s ‘Mickey’s Christmas Carol’) or subversively (1988’s ‘Scrooged.’)  We even got a sarcastic one just this year with the Reynolds-Ferrell team up ‘Spirited,’ although I don’t think anyone is arguing that that one is definitive of anything except maybe exhaustion.

              About the only interesting thing about an adaptation at this point is what parts they do or don’t include or what high-concept spin they put on it.  The interesting text is the metatext, not the story itself but the way it’s told.  My usual complaint with adaptations is that the story isn’t long enough for a full 90-minute feature film without some serious padding.  When the padding is well done and charming, like when you stick a bunch of Muppets in the frame and let them do their thing for 86 minutes, it’s great.  When you keep just the important parts, center it around Scrooge McDuck, and keep it around 26 minutes, it’s just fine.  Even Sim kept it under 90 minutes. 

              So this version’s runtime of 25 minutes should be completely workable, depending on what they cut.  The Disney version got rid of a lot: the worldwide tour by Christmas Present to lighthouses and boats and such, the creepy kids under the Ghost’s robes, the scenes of people discussing his death, the stuff that doesn’t really fit in with the whole kid-friendly vibe.  The effect of this is to keep the story much more focused on the personal actions and redemption of Scrooge as a person and deemphasis the fairly stark criticism of capitalistic practices that gave the original a little bit of satirical bite.  This is as is expected of Disney even in its reduced 80’s state.  The metatext here becomes a large corporation producing a version of the story that focuses on personal redemption severed from any connection to a larger system that they themselves are a part of.  A Marxist reading of the short would be very easy, is what I’m saying.

              So what is the metatextual reading of this version?  That they didn’t want to make any decisions so instead crammed in as much as possible, making every moment as important as every other moment and therefore all equally unimportant.

              I was confused for the longest time about why this version seemed so rushed when I didn’t have the same problem with the almost identically long Disney version.  Then I went through and noted what was cut and what was emphasized in that telling and understood.  Until I looked it up I assumed the version with Scrooge McDuck was closer to 45 minutes but then I realized that it was simply paced better so didn’t seem like the speed-run version this is.  In many ways I’m being unfair to this special by comparing it to a known classic but director Richard Williams and lead animator Ken Harris deserve to be held in the same esteem as any Disney animator so I’m doing it anyway.

              Most people don’t know his name but a lot of them are very familiar with Williams’ work as he was the animation director for ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit.’  He also did the title sequences for the fourth and fifth Pink Panther movies and in cult circles he’s known as the mad genius behind the staggering undertaking that is the unfinished ‘The Thief and the Cobbler.’  With that background in mind, it becomes clear that the point of this special was to give the animators the opportunity to show off their techniques and give them something interesting to draw.  There isn’t even a credited writer on the special, it just lists Charles Dickens.  Someone took a highlighter to the text and then handed that off to the storyboard artists.

              That leads naturally to the next question: is the art any good?  I’m going to give a qualified yes.  It alternates between fairly realistic portrayals of humans and backgrounds during the opening and closing scenes with occasional stylistic flourishes during transitions (Scrooge walking home in empty blackness, charcoal sketches of London during the opening credits) and gets increasingly stylized during the ghost segments.  The designs here are fairly striking, from a mostly sketched-in Marley with a distended open mouth as he speaks to a Ghost of Christmas Past that seems to exist as a series of flickers slowly catching up to each other as they move.  The camera isn’t static, often moving within a scene so the figures shift to different perspectives, which can work really well when the animation can match the movement but can produce odd proportions when they can’t.  Fifty years ago they didn’t have computers to help work out the angles so they had to do it all by eye. 

              Since this special is essentially the flip-book version of the story, scenes coming and going in the blink of an eye often with no obvious relation to the scenes before or after them, any kind of coherent message is hard to piece together.  The death of Tiny Tim is given less screen time than a bunch of miners singing around a fireplace.  Christmas Present explaining Ignorance and Want are given more screen time than Scrooge breaking his engagement in the past.  They do a good job of establishing that Scrooge is a prick at the start and showing that he’s changed into a giggly nice guy at the end but the middle is such a clattering series of impressionistic scenes that it’s never clear exactly which points landed with Scrooge to get him to undergo this change.  The scene at Fezziwig’s exists but Scrooge isn’t shown reflecting on it in any way.  We see his fellow stockbrokers talking about his funeral but not Scrooge’s reaction.  It’s not that a viewer unfamiliar with the source material wouldn’t understand what’s going on, the narrative is still all there, they just likely wouldn’t get why it’s considered such a classic.

              It’s somewhat interesting to note that Alastair Sims reprises his role as Scrooge here and of course he’s very good, but he’s not asked to do anything new for the role.  Since the scenes are so brief his performance is squeezed in between all the transitions and he doesn’t get a chance to do more than basically just read the lines.  The rest of the cast is fine in the few lines they get.  It’s all British character actors including Michael Redgrave, Diana Quick, and Melvyn Hayes.  It was produced in part by Chuck Jones Productions, aired on ABC tv, and was well-enough received that it was briefly released theatrically, qualifying it for an Oscar which it won for Best Animated Short Film of 1972, an award that caused controversy and led to the rule change that disqualified entries from debuting on television first, leading to all of the theatrical release shenanigans that Netflix and Apple perform each year to get their films eligible for the awards.

              This special has sort of the inverse problem as ‘Santa and the Three Bears,’ this could have been well-served by being stretched out over a longer runtime.  In the absence of that whoever adapted this should have made any decision about what to include other than “everything.”  Instead of an adaptation this is a Cliffnotes version, a speedreading summation of the mail plot points with no time to emphasize any part of it to show why this story is being told or what it’s trying to say.  In a good adaptation of the source material you need to feel some kind of fondness for Ebeneezer Scrooge, or at least understand why he started the story the way he did and why he’s changed at the end of it.  In the good version we get all of that: by the end of “The Muppet Christmas Carol” I want nothing more than to give Michael Caine a big ol’ hug.  At the end of “Scrooged” Bill Murray has changed from charmless asshole to affable asshole, and we love him for it.  “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” does such a good job with Scrooge McDuck he got his own tv series just four years later.  At the end of this one I’m just slightly impressed at the efficient way they rattled off the story points and hopeful that the animators enjoyed all the different ways they got to draw ghosts and Victorian London.

Christmas Is (1970)

I did not expect to become suspicious of Lutherans this holiday season yet here we are.  I think I was pretty fair to the Davey and Goliath special, on the whole I think I treated the special overall as well-intentioned and heartfelt.  It give give me the impression that a yawning cavern of existential despair was just on the other side of the plasticine models inexpertly held at bay by Christmas platitudes, but that’s not really their fault.

I guess the idea is that the special will finish the sentence?

This was another special produced by the Lutheran Church, this time through Lutheran Television.  I am willing to grant that this one has that same degree of earnestness and sincerity as ‘Davey and Goliath Christmas Lost and Found’ but I’m increasingly unsure about how well-intentioned it is.  Or should I say I’m sure the makers considered themselves to be well-intentioned and honestly believed that the message they conveyed was for the benefit of those watching, I’m just increasingly unwilling to trust their judgement on how useful or meaningful that message is.

              There’s some initial confusion as the special opens with flurry of shots, one of which I was sure involves an eldritch horror hanging in space above the planet but gives way to a succession of children floating in the void that eventually resolves itself into a montage of various cultural displays of Christmas of I’m sure varying authenticity.   It’s at least not purposefully racist, Lutherans of the past continue to do the bare minimum.  This then transitions right to the ongoing rehearsal of a school nativity play.  One thing I’m learning is that Lutherans sure love their school plays.  There are various cast shenanigans, they eventually return to the classroom, and right through to the title screen there’s no indication of a plot or even a main character.  Several kids have been named but none have been focused on to any extent, any one of them could be who the special is about.

After the credits we seem to finally focus on a character named Benji.  He’s complaining to his fellow students about being cast as the second shepherd in the play.  Quite a lot of social worth seems to be tied up in what part you have in the nativity scene as he is in fact teased by his castmates for such a terrible role.  One of them is more sympathetic and as they peel off on their way home he says the part is fine and the conversation turns into how Benji, just like Davey, isn’t really sure what Christmas is all about.  I can’t say the continued emphasis on a confused kid who needs to be taught the ‘real’ meaning of Christmas is all that surprising in this context but it does draw quite a contrast to the other secular specials.  It makes me more sympathetic to what they’re trying to do but the execution continues to leave me a little wary.

Just before he gets home, he runs into another friend who apparently goes to another school who’s all smug that he gets to play an elf in their school play.  Benji is further bummed out and continues home where he’s mean to his dog, Waldo, who this time at least doesn’t talk.  He decides to go over his lines from the play and here we get the rest of the special as both he and the dog are unceremoniously transported to Biblical Bethlehem.

I want to be annoyed at how this is handled but I simply can’t.  It’s clearly some level of fantasy as he’s curled up with his dog in the real world and after a scene transition is transported there on his now flying dog.  It’s never intended to be interpreted as actually real, there’s never a question of not understanding what people are saying, no one is upset by their appearance, but at the same time everything is treated pretty realistically.  They get afraid of people, they get hungry, they seek shelter and even go to sleep overnight at one point, none of which gets explained or even addressed.  The fact that they probably had a meeting where they sat down and thought about how to handle this then just said the Lutheran equivalent of ‘fuck it’ and moved on is kind of great.

There are a few interesting ways this section handles the portrayal of Bethlehem, none of which I’m going to claim are accurate but are generally things I haven’t seen before.  The first and least interesting is that the person they interact with the most is the innkeeper who will eventually allow Joseph and Mary to crash in his manger.  He’s portrayed fairly sympathetically as completely overwhelmed by all the travelers coming to the city.  He’s also harassed by the local Romans, one of which is given a decent number of lines and portrayed as also overwhelmed and not completely unreasonable if, y’know, still a commander of an occupying force.  The innkeeper allows Benji and Waldo to sleep on the floor of the inn overnight. The second interesting thing is the portrayal of those travelers who exclusively talk in exposition speak, both asking and answering questions to each other for the benefit of Benji and his dog and I guess us.  One child does ask the obvious question of why everyone has to go back to their ancestral homes for a census when that precisely defeats the purpose of a census.  This doesn’t get answered but it is an excuse to talk about prophecy and the coming of a messiah, which everyone is sure will be along any day now.  This … is an interesting thing to include, as due to the Roman occupation there was an upswing of Messianic belief at the time that tended to come up whenever the Jewish people were being particularly oppressed.  If you want to dip a toe into this subject look into Jesus ben Ananias or other contemporary messianic figures.

While they’re sleeping the whole Baby Jeebs thing goes down out in the stable, which is portrayed as everyone being woken up by this random bright-ass star outside, which is fairly funny.  Benji and Waldo know what’s going on while everyone else just piles outside to complain about all the commotion.  They start to head back inside, unimpressed by Baby Jeebs, but they notice some shepherds heading towards the stable which is apparently interesting enough to keep them standing around.  Presumably to justify having Benji himself around this special makes the nativity super-crowded, having the inhabitants of the Inn witness everything as well and eventually drawing the attention of a set of asshole Roman guards led by the one from before.

The thing I kept finding most surprising was the continued focus on the occupying Roman forces.  They had to have been there to some extent, and I’m sure their relationship with the locals was tense at best, but this is the first time I’ve seen them have an active presence in a nativity story, but even as prominent as they are they don’t actually have any point.  Giving some background on the innkeeper makes some amount of sense as he was a presence in the story, that also goes for the wise men and shepherds as they do eventually show up in the narrative, especially that second one to inspire Benji, but despite appearing several times to threaten him and his dog and to disrupt the gathering around the Baby Jeebs they’re never mentioned in the nativity play that ostensibly inspired this entire thing and after making vaguely threatening noises they always just go away, affecting nothing.

After talking with the second shepherd Benji tells him his part was so important for unclear reasons while the shepherd replies it is Jeebs who is truly important, then suddenly Benji is back in his room and all hyped up about appearing in the play, and also Jesus.  He rushes out, finds his elf-playing friend, and without any explanation furiously insists directly into his face that he simply must come to their play.  He then rushes off leaving his friend visibly confused.  The play is then presented more-or-less as it as happened in the Bethlehem fantasy and then the special ends.

Once again I’m left at the end of a special fairly sure of the intended message that was meant to be conveyed but more or less adrift on how it went about conveying that message.  With Davey and Goliath I at least got that he had a friend he did a selfless deed for and that inspired him, I was pretty on board with that, but in this one Benji is brought around to feeling that all-important Christmas feeling by … imagining that innkeepers got harassed a bunch back in olden times?  The actual Jeebs portion of the special is maybe a few minutes and most of that is people wandering around the manger wondering why that bright star woke them up, then a shepherd mentions that Jesus is totally great.  I’m not sure how that connected in Benji’s brain to bring him around to loving his part in the school play and how that then led to him both loving Jesus more and connecting with the Christmas spirit.  This doesn’t have a scene where Benji is wracked with ennui and sobs into a pillow so I’m going to have to deduct a few points for that.  The problem might be that this is intended for an audience already on board and it’s more a reminder than a full lesson, but I think losing a scene or two of Roman soldiers being jerks and a little more time questioning man’s relationship to the divine would have been helpful. 

The Night the Animals Talked (1970)

The makers of this special very clearly wanted to tell us something and were very worried we might miss it so decided to spend every single moment of this special repeating it over and over in very small words to make as sure as possible that we could not have missed it.  Which is a shame because while they keep saying it over and over and underlining it again and again the message never actually comes together because what they think they’re saying is so very, very undermined by everything else.

The title screen promises madness and it does not lie.

This is another special that laser-focuses on a part of the nativity scene other than the Baby Jeebs.  Instead of a drummer boy or the wise men or the shepherds it focuses on the animals.  There’s an entire field of study on the historical depictions of the animals in the manger scene, from their pastoral imagery to the way they emphasize the humble nature of the scene, how various cultures at various times chose to either include or omit certain animals, the implications this had for the economic status of both the artists and the intended audiences, but the important part here is they are traditionally passive observers to the birth as after all they are just animals.

The conceit of this special is that, for no actual stated reason, the animals are granted the power of speech for the night of the nativity.  It’s unstated but they’re also granted the power of conscious thought, as one isn’t very useful without the other, but there’s a special emphasis placed on the speech itself, both in songs and at the climax.  What’s odd is that although it’s very explicit that the animals are given the gift of human speech, and it is specifically human speech, at no point do they ever talk to a human.  Nor is a human ever depicted on screen, not even the Baby Jeebs.  So within the logic of the special there is no actual reason for the animals to be able to talk as the humans do, yet a great deal of attention is paid to the fact that this is what they’re doing.  In animation animals talking to each other but becoming mute around humans is very common and doesn’t require any explanation so it’s notable that this is exactly what doesn’t happen.

The point the makers seem to think they’re making is that animals are better than humans because they’re not as mean and petty as we are and once given the gift of speech they start acting like humans, much to their dismay, and wouldn’t it be better if we all acted like them in their simple wisdom.  Which … doesn’t make any sense?  I mean it doesn’t make sense in broader ethical terms, as we’ll get to, but it also doesn’t make sense within the logic of the story, as in the opening few minutes before the speechifying they’re shown acting territorial and adversarial to each other anyways, and after starting to talk they just make explicit what was implied through their actions before.  They aren’t models of good behavior before talking, aren’t during, and really only act better towards the end after being shamed for acting like humans, which as I said seems to be the moral but doesn’t follow from their behavior up to that point.  It also attempts to establish that it’s the talking itself that’s causing the bad behavior, which even if it was consistent with how they’d been portrayed at the beginning is a very odd message, that communication itself is the source of human conflict.

If there was a way the talking could have affected the plot it would be in the interaction between the animals and Mary and Joseph, but instead it’s all done with their donkey.  While the animals are still bickering between themselves the dog wanders out and comes across the party Jeebs.  He talks briefly to the donkey, which was either granted those same magic talking powers or it’s your typical ‘animals can talk to each other’ cartoon logic, which I will again point out is very directly what is not happening the rest of the time, then they head on back to the barn where the other animals make it very clear they are not interested in sharing.  They use some very on-the-nose terminology, such as not ‘assimilating’ and how ‘there’s no room for strangers,’ that sort of thing.  The party is turned away, which means in this telling there’s no interaction with an innkeeper, which also means that in the reality of Mary and Joseph their donkey led them to a random stable, brayed a bit at some noisy animals inside, then led them away again.  After being shamed the animals send some birds to go bring them back which somehow causes them to turn around again, which is again inexplicable from the point of view of Mary and Joseph.  Their donkey listened to some birds and went back to the stable?  They must’ve been really annoyed with their donkey.  Freakin’ Nestor.

What further causes the entire metaphor to collapse is the other animals’ treatment of the two pigs.  The animals bicker amongst themselves in the confines of the barn, the hens are mad at the rooster, the goat is annoyed with everyone, that sort of thing, but everyone can agree that the pigs are filthy and need to stay outside.  The pigs can talk like everyone else but even after the rest of the animals are shamed into allowing the Baby Jeebs and company into the barn they are excluded and have to sit outside feeling bad.  The special tries to get around this by having the other animals not reprimand them when they sneak into the barn to marvel at the glow from Baby Jeebs but they certainly weren’t invited in by the supposed goodly animals.

Then there’s the end of the special, which is where I throw up my hands entirely and just start guessing at what they meant to say.  After witnessing the birth of the Baby Jeebs the ox, who’s been acting as the animals’ conscience and variously reading them for filth as the special progresses, declares that human birth and love are miracles and they need to spread the word.  Instantly the animals are all about this and run out of the manger into the dawn sunlight, yelling to the still empty town that birth is a miracle and love is a miracle, they’re all really into it.  Quickly their yells devolve into their usual barks and squawks and other animal noises and as they lose their speech they also lose their intelligence.  The ox is the last to go as he stares directly into the camera and states that although they’re losing their gift of speech they had it for one night and hopes that it’s not too late for mankind to learn the truth.  The last shot is of them wandering back to their barn.

There’s a lot to unpack here.  I guess the most obvious reading of this ending revelation is that’s it very literal, that they witnessed the birth of Jeebs and meant specifically that this was a miracle, and the ox’s comment was proselytizing in nature.  Or one could make an argument that they were being more humanist in their message, that birth and love in general are miracles and we need to think about that and be better people.  Either way this is all really undermined by the fact that the moment they learn this important lesson, whichever it is, both the ability to communicate this lesson and in fact the lesson itself are stripped from them before any humans can be told.  It really makes for a confusing moral.  This is obviously meant to be for the benefit of the viewing audience but what benefit are we supposed to actually take from it?  If it’s as simple as “be nice to each other and also believe in Jesus,” why were the animals granted superpowers?  Why were they suddenly taken away?  Is the lesson that God just likes messing with animals?

The logic underlying the most basic decisions behind this special utterly escapes me.  All they had to do was not have the animals actually talk as the humans do.  With this one simple fix the entire cascade of logical problems collapses into a simple narrative.  Having the animals act like people before the baby Jeebs inspires them to be better actually clarifies the moral immensely if you remove the human speech part.  Still have the conversation with the donkey, just have Mary and Joseph having the same conversation in the background with the innkeeper.  Instead of having them run out into the streets only to have their speech peeled from their brains just have them resolve to be nicer to each other within the barn.  The fact that the animals talk does nothing but complicate and confuse an otherwise simple reframing of the nativity story to show it from the animals’ perspective.  I am utterly baffled by the entire conceit.  I would genuinely be fascinated by a simple conversation by any of the executives involved in causing this thing to exist.