Christmas is a time for tradition – presents, decorations, carols, and mince pies. But what better tradition to celebrate than the Christmas movie? Join The Hollywood News for the Movie Advent Calendar – a film each day ’til Christmas. For the full Advent Calendar so far, click here.
Movies are, as I’m sure they are for many of you too, a big part of my family’s Christmas celebrations. I’ve grown up, moved away, got a degree and found a job, yet I still, to this day, watch THE MUPPETS CHRISTMAS CAROL every Christmas Eve with my big brother and my parents just before I go to bed. Every family has their old favourites, it’s the very reason The Hollywood News is celebrating one a day, but one recent film (as recent as you can call it given the seasonal restrictions) has managed to smash through my family’s staple of tradition and become an instant classic.
Aardman’s ARTHUR CHRISTMAS is, under any criteria you want to judge it – brilliant! The animation has a unique style. It nails humour whether it is slapstick, ‘pun-believable’ or straight up absurd. It’s got old fashioned values at heart with a fresh and original idea and it even manages to modernise Christmas without trying to make it seem ‘cool’. The idea of Christmas Day being played out like a military operation with elves in spy gear could easily go horribly wrong, but the writing, along with an all-star British voice cast featuring James McAvoy, Hugh Laurie, Jim Broadbent, Bill Nighy, Ashley Jensen and Michael Palin, means you’re never just going through the motions.
McAvoy is Arthur Claus, the son of the current Santa, Malcolm (played by Broadbent) and just about the nicest guy you could ever meet. His older brother, Steve (played by Laurie), effectively runs everything from the North Pole ‘mission control’ base that sees every child receives their gift with military precision. When Gwen, a little girl in Cornwall, fails to get the pink bicycle she wanted, Steve claims that only one missed child is an acceptable mistake, meaning it’s up to Arthur (getting a bit of help from Grand-Santa and an elf called Bryony) to make sure the present gets there in time for Christmas morning.
The film does a terrific job of making real characters out of the Claus family. It would have been easy to just have one, perfectly wholesome and undeniably brilliant Santa but instead that ideology is boiled down into Arthur and he’s stuck down in the mail room answering children’s letters. Malcom, while the current Santa, is a figure-head who doesn’t understand the technology around him, which is run by Steve and who has lost the emotion of the occasion amid making delivering presents ruthlessly efficient. Grand-Santa spouts the cranky ‘back in my day’ tales we expect from a hundred and thirty-six year old, but he’s bitter about not having the spotlight anymore and sees Arthur’s quest as a way to boost his own ego.
ARTHUR CHRISTMAS also succeeds in the great comedy film test of making sure you’re laughing as soon as possible. We open with the letter Gwen has written to Santa, played absolutely adorably by Ramona Marquez (of Outnumbered fame) and it’s hard not to break down when she asks about exponential population growth and why she can’t find Santa’s house on Google Earth. The elves are a constant source of fun as they have their own special jobs, little quirks and one-liners so you never know what you’re going to hear from them next. Mission control waits with baited breath as a toy threatens to wake a child with “ten seconds of constant mooing” and when they learn of Steve’s belief that missing just one child doesn’t matter, they’re sent into hysterics, one even crying out “Is it true children aren’t real, they’re just anti-matter?”
Leaping between Steve with the elves, Arthur’s adventure to get Gwen her present and Malcolm’s bumbling attempts to understand what’s going on keeps the story at a great pace. It’s action packed, it’s infinitely quotable, it’s wonderful, it’s heart-warming and is there anything more fundamentally lovely than a film about making sure a little girl gets the right gift for Christmas?
