Aardman Animation Studio

(On Cable TV, January 2018) Watching Christmas movies after December 26 is a risky thing—at a minimum the air’s gone out of the Christmas spirit, and at worst, well, anyone can be excused for thinking that they don’t even want to hear about Christmas for another eleven months. In other words: that’s the time of the year during which to distinguish the good Christmas movies from those who only run on holiday magic. Fortunately, Arthur Christmas is one of the decent ones, and this surprisingly enjoyable animated fantasy film gets going early on with a detailed depiction of Santa Claus’s Christmas delivery logistics, from Santa using an army of elves as a staging crew, a gigantic ship, an enormous mission control and the refinements we can expect from an ultra-high-tech operation. This, in turn, leads to one of the central conflicts in the film—the contrast between the technology required to achieve a mass toy-delivery operation, and the Christmas spirit that motivates it. Our hero is a clumsy but well-meaning young man, Santa’s least favourite son—not seen as the favourite to take over operations once the old man retires. In the tradition of modern CGI features, Arthur Christmas is a zippy story that uses the possibilities of the medium to show us how a Santa operation could run, then strands the protagonist in multiple adventures to have them prove their worth. The depth of imagination, both visual and conceptual, can be explained by this being from the Aardman animation studio. But no matter the pedigree, Arthur Christmas is an engaging film, and one that most won’t mind revisiting throughout the year.

(On Cable TV, December 2018) I’ve been a big fan of Aardman Studio’s stop-motion animated films, but Early Man is perhaps the first of them to leave me unsatisfied. Despite the outstanding technical polish of the animation, the film takes a very long time to come in focus. As we’re thrust into a comic portrayal of a prehistoric civilization, the gags feel lacking, and the story doesn’t seem to go anywhere for a while. When it does, it’s a disappointment because Early Man reveals itself to be … a football/soccer comedy. (The title can mean “Early Manchester,” as in the British football team.) From that point on, it becomes obvious that the film is made by and for football fans: it becomes an underdog sports comedy and despite the setting the plot and comedy become very familiar, which is not Aardman’s trademark. (Or is it? Because as I write this, it occurs to me that Aardman’s signature successes have been to put the familiar in an unfamiliar setting—WW2 POW Camp escape for poultry in Chicken Run, and Horror Movie tropes in kid’s animal clothing for The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.) While the result is surely sympathetic, it does stay far more ordinary than I would have liked. No one’s perfect, I guess—but I’m still looking forward to the next Aardman film.