An Almost Christmas Story (2024)

This half-hour animated special appeared on Disney+ this year, and it's very pretty, but not much more than that.

The story follows Moon, a young owl whose impulsive optimism gets him into trouble; he hides from an eagle in a big tree that is then cut down and sent to NYC for Christmas. Moon runs afoul of some territorial pigeons and ends up lost in the city, where he eventually runs into a human girl, Luna, who is also alone. They travel around the city together over montages and music. 

Moon wants to get back to the tree because his dad said to stay put. At first, Luna helps him get back to Rockefeller Center, but when they finally get there, she realizes that other owls won't be able to find him. So she reaches out to adults for help getting Moon home to the forest, and help for her to get home as well. Everyone is home for the holidays: The End. 

At the very start, the singing narrator (John C Reilly, evoking Rankin-Bass, but not quite nailing it) explicitly tells us that the story is a Christmas story because it's both happy and sad. But he also tells us that it means a lot. And... this tries very hard to be a melancholy holiday story. But there's so little story there that I had trouble seeing how it meant much of anything.

The piece is more of an impressionist painting than a story. To be fair, the only other things I've seen by director David Lowery have also been more interested in tone and visuals than coherent plots. So your mileage and enjoyment may vary depending on how important story and characters are to you.

We never learn anything about Luna except that she is wandering alone after going skating, and that she has a prosthetic leg, which is a point of connection with Moon after he hurts one wing. A lot of Luna's early dialogue implies that she doesn't often spend time in Manhattan, but she also says that she lives in the city with her mom. This is all we learn about her, so it's never reconciled. 

(Side note about a personal pet peeve of mine. Baby owls don't look like small owls and can't fly. People fall for fake pictures of CG owls thinking they're real because animation keeps lying about owl biology. Grrr.) 

The style is what this piece has going for it. It's CG, but it pretty convincingly looks like stop-motion. Specifically, it looks like almost everything is made out of cardboard. I especially liked how all the unimportant people in the city are just two-dimensional cutouts and the pigeons look like they're made of scraped up paper or wood. It's extremely neat to watch. 

Some of the jokes are funny and the individual moments are sweet and sad and pretty. I just wished it had come together as a stronger whole. 

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