Mainlining Christmas

The original Prep & Landing continues to rank among my all-time favorite holiday specials. I love the way it reimagines Christmas elves through the lens of secret agents and high-pressure missions, building to a tense climax with stakes that feel important while still remaining within the scale of the story. Likewise, while Operation Secret Santa was only a short, it manages to capture the magic of the original, giving us the excitement of a life-or-death spy movie in the package of a sweet Christmas cartoon. Good stuff. After that, we got Naughty vs. Nice , a full-length special that sort of abandoned the tone of the original. There are still some good moments in there, but it's missing the sense of suspense. It's more a kid's cartoon playing with spy movie concepts, while the first two were legitimate spy stories told within a world of Christmas specials. But at least it remembered its roots. The third special in the series, The Snowball Protocol (directed by Shane ...

The third Niko film is the best to date, at least as far as the writing is concerned. The eagles in the second movie basically filled the same role as the wolves in the first , which made it feel somewhat recycled. This time, the primary antagonists are a rival group of reindeer with an axe to grind against Niko's father and Santa's Flying Forces, which makes for a more compelling arc, particularly because the series has always made it clear there are good reasons to hate those guys. It also plays with its genre references in more interesting ways, adding in elements of sports movies into the mix. That's hardly new to animated media about reindeer, but this time it means the story's destination isn't quite as obvious from the start. That's the good news. The bad is the animation feels like a slight step backward. I'm sure it's technically more impressive than the last movie (they had more than a decade of technological advances, after all), but whatever...

Okay, that wasn't half bad. Actually... hold on. Let me double-check my math. Actually, I take it back: this was exactly half bad. But that does mean it was half good, which is a hell of a lot better than the first installment . The improvements are mainly in the animation, which received a substantial upgrade, likely due to the first being fairly successful. This wasn't giving Disney or Dreamworks a run for their money, but to my eye it looks about on par with most of what Blue Sky was putting out around that time. Given this was probably made for a tiny fraction of the money US studios have, that's pretty impressive. The characters interact better with their environments (though the lighting still looks off at times), and - more importantly - the action sequences are kinetic and engaging, both in how they're storyboarded and brought to life. This was a huge issue with the first movie, so I was happy to see the course correction. Unfortunately the writing didn't im...

Even the title of this animated movie is difficult to unravel. This was a Finnish production, but it was animated in English before being released with several different titles, including at least two English titles depending on which country you were in. "The Flight Before Christmas" is the title for the US release, the far superior "Niko & The Way to the Stars" is the title in other English-speaking markets, and "Niko – Lentäjän poika" (which translates to something like, "Niko: Flier's Son") is the Finnish title. And, as far as I can tell, none of these are any more or less official than the others. Despite a strong preference for "The Way of the Stars," I'm going with the US title, since that's how this is primarily listed in the US. Adding complications, there are a few different versions of this floating around, because at some point this was also cut down to 45 minutes and shown on TV. For better or worse, we watc...

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 ...

If That Christmas had been released a decade ago, it would probably have performed modestly at the box office, sold well on DVD, gone into circulation on television and streaming, and be on its way to becoming a holiday classic. It's not reinventing the wheel, but it's the right mix of sweet, funny, and somber that makes for a fantastic experience that stays with you. This is really good stuff, with inspired voice casting and beautiful animation. But this wasn't made a decade ago, nor was it made five years ago, when the Disney/Fox merger threw production and release plans into disarray. So, here we are in 2024, when it's become pretty common for things like this to get picked up by Netflix and subsequently forgotten. Critics aren't enthusiastic about this one, either, so it's unlikely this will get much of a boost during awards season. Hell, we'll be lucky if this ever gets a blu-ray release (though if it does you can bet your ass I'll be buying a copy)...

Here's another parent review for y'all. At some point earlier this year, my daughter decided that she was interested in the Minnie's Bow-Toons shorts that are available on Disney+. And I discovered that there's a whole dang animated Disney Junior universe. As far as I can tell, first there was a popular animated show for preschoolers about Mickey Mouse and friends called Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Minnie's Bow-Toons is a series of shorts spinning off of that show. But after the original MMC stopped airing, it was retooled and returned as a new show in a similar style: Mickey Mouse Roadster Racers, which ran for two seasons before the format was changed again and it was renamed Mickey Mouse Mixed-Up Adventures. This spawned more sets of spin-off shorts, including new seasons of Bow-Toons, now called Minnie's Bow-Toons: Party Palace Pals. The latest season of Bow-Toons, Camp Minnie, changes up its format even further to focus on outdoor activities. There are even mor...

Here's another random show that my kid likes. The Book of Pooh was a Disney Channel show telling new Pooh stories with puppets and CG backgrounds. Looking back at it today it's a bit dated at times, but at other times it resembles pop-up illustrations or watercolors in an interesting way. Like many kids shows, it features music and mildly educational content. In this special Christmas episode, Roo can't sleep on the night before Christmas Eve, so Kanga sings him a song-story about a magic wish-granting tree that appears if there's snow on Christmas Eve. Side note: Kanga and Roo weren't in the first season of this show, so I hadn't seen much of their house before this episode. Roo's bedroom has a boomerang displayed on the wall and a prominent toy koala. I think that's a cute touch. Kanga doesn't completely finish the story before Roo gets distracted and then falls asleep, so Roo assumes the tree grants any wish for anyone (which is not what she said)...

Here we are, back in Equestria for the holidays again, but not the same holiday we knew from Friendship Is Magic . This special is from a series of follow-ups to the 2021 movie that rebooted the My Little Pony continuity with a huge time jump (MLP: A New Generation). I saw that movie, and I remember it being enjoyable enough, if not amazing. All you need to know about this new special is that it's not terrible, but it's so bland that it's just sort of a time waster for kids.  Ok, all you need to know to follow the plot of the new special is that in the movie a group of young ponies met and became friends: earnest earth pony Sunny, ditzy artsy unicorn Izzy, neurotic rule-following earth pony Hitch, and the princess pegasus sisters Pipp (bubbly pop star) and Zipp (sardonic tomboy). They ended up working together to restore lost magic to Equestria. By the time of the special, people are still figuring out what that means.  The ponies have been living together in Sunny's l...

Released alongside the live-action Smurfs movie on DVD, The Smurfs: A Christmas Carol is a mix of 3D and 2D animation loosely adapting Dickens' story. I should probably note that I've never seen the movie this ties to: I only subject myself to things like that when Christmas is involved. The story is, of course, set in Smurf village, which is getting ready for Christmas. Everyone's singing "Smurf the Halls" and decorating except Grumpy Smurf, and when the others confront him, he tells them he hates the holiday and won't decorate or celebrate with them. This comes as a surprise to his neighbors: despite his name and personality, he apparently used to like Christmas. They all gather together to try and find a way to improve Grumpy's disposition - because it won't be the same if everyone doesn't conform to the culturally and commercially mandated yuletide enthusiasm. Seriously, cartoons need to stop pulling this crap. The problem with Scrooge isn'...

Strictly speaking, this probably doesn't need  to be revisited. Lindsay reviewed it back in 2011 , and while it's more a summary than what we do these days, it's more substantial than most of our reviews from the first couple years of the blog. Even so, I'm trying to rewatch every significant adaptation of A Christmas Carol, so I've got some thoughts. This is, of course, the CG motion capture version directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Jim Carrey as Scrooge and all three spirits. The intention was to bring Charles Dickens's story and John Leech's illustrations to life through the use of modern visual effects. Motion capture offered a way to merge performance with animation to an extent that hadn't previously been possible. It was a lofty goal. I don't think it's controversial to say they failed miserably. There's something deeply wrong with the way the human characters (and most of the spectral ones) appear. They resemble grotesque wax f...

A few years ago, we were surprised and delighted by Angela's Christmas , which was a joy in basically every way. I actually remember seeing that this sequel existed last year, but I was hesitant about it. No more source material plus a lot of good press for the first one could easily lead to something rushed and poorly written. And even in the best-case scenario, what could possibly live up to the first special?  Well, not this, but it's still very good. Funny, charming, adorable, uplifting, and really grounded in ways that animation often isn't. It's just not, you know, transformative children's media. If you liked the first one, I recommend you check this out. If you didn't see the first one, go watch that! Angela's Christmas Wish (also marketed as Angela's Chrismas 2) starts with an introduction that takes place before the events of the first movie, in which we see Angela's dad get on a boat for a job in Australia. (Reminder that this all takes pl...

I want to start off by acknowledging there are almost certainly people out there who'd really get a kick out of this new stop-motion Netflix special. There are things to like about this - I'll get to those in a moment - and I really like how dedicated this is to capturing the spirit of 1950s B-movie sci-fi features. But while I like what it was going for, the special fell short for me. And unfortunately, I think this is one of those concepts where "almost good" isn't good enough. The premise relies on a species of alien marauders called klepts, who go from world to world stealing resources. These beings were once brightly colored, but their cruelty transformed them into grey lifeforms, devoid of compassion. So far, so good. One of the two main characters is X, the smallest of the klepts, who's dispatched to the North Pole to construct a device that will nullify Earth's gravity, making it easy for the alien ships to gather up the planet's possessions. T...

I can forgive The LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special for being bad, but I can't forgive it for not being bad enough. The original Star Wars Holiday Special , of course, is a thing of legend. It's impossibly bad, unbelievably bizarre, and utterly mystifying. It's never officially been released, and everyone involved seems ashamed. I'm not saying this had  to be that bad, but it had to be... something. Most importantly, it needed to be memorable, and The LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special is already fading from memory minutes after watching. I guess I better get the plot down before it's gone for good. Set soon after Rise of Skywalker, the special opens with Rey trying (and failing) to train Finn to become a Jedi while their friends are preparing for Life Day. Blaming herself for Finn's lack of progression, Rey follows some advice in an old Jedi tome and heads out in search of a lost Jedi temple. BB-8 accompanies her for some reason. They locate the temple and come across...