Arthur Christmas marks the fourth feature film from Aardman Animation, the British animation studio from Bristol, United Kingdom known for their stop-motion clay animation techniques. Aardman is probably best received for the Academy-Award-winning Wallace and Gromit series, which is about a scatterbrained inventor and cheese enthusiast living in Lancashire with his anthropomorphic dog.
They have also produced two other greatly underrated films with Dreamworks – Chicken Run (2000), using their trademark Plasticine figures, and Flushed Away (2006), in which they made their transition into computer animation. Anyone who’s seen anything from Aardman, knows that it’s a studio that treats its stories with the utmost care. They load their films with the same intricate details, quirky characters, and complex emotions that has earned Pixar Studios its reputation and respect.
James McAvoy stars as voice of the title character Arthur, a peculiar and tenderhearted, albeit naïve, member of the Christmas family. The men of the Christmas family, like the British monarchy, have the honor of being crowned Santa Claus. For generations, they’ve taken up that duty with the utmost pride and seriousness. Arthur’s older brother Steve (voiced by House’s Hugh Laurie, donning his native British accent) is the Christmas golden boy – he is portrayed as part military leader and part CEO. Steve, with his goatee shaped like the silhouette of a Christmas tree, has revolutionized the gift production and delivering process, ridding the north pole of reindeers, sleighs, and tinker toys made of balsa wood and lead. Steve, with a Santa Claus suit apparently designed by Versace, uses a sleek spaceship and Mission: Impossible-like elves who carry iPhone-like devices. Steve is a shoo-in for the role of Santa and Arthur, who happily spends his time in the letter-writing department kindly responding to all the children of the world, doesn’t seem to mind at all.
This changes, of course, when Arthur discovers that one gift hasn’t been delivered. While everyone around him – even Santa Claus himself – seems to dismiss this one child, Arthur, with the aid of his grandfather and an elf named Bryony, is determined to deliver the present before sunrise.
Arthur’s odyssey spans over the entire world, and covers everything exciting and strange and silly. But similar to the immensity and bizarreness of the adventure in Pixar’s Up, Arthur Christmas doesn’t ever lose intimacy with its characters. As silly and scattered as it all seems to be, Arthur is triumphant in representing what Christmastime means to so many children – fun, family and closeness. But he is also unwavering despite the dangers of the task, and advances on despite the setbacks and the tough choices in order to do what he believes is right. Ultimately, Arthur is the unlikely hero, done with just the right touch from Aardman Animations so that he doesn’t feel like a cliché, a cookie-cutter character like all the rest. Moreover, Arthur’s primary opposition seems to be his own family, who isn’t evil or heartless. Instead, they’re flawed, like any real part of an unconventional family.
In the middle of it all, there’s a discussion about the tensions between the old and the new; the film asks about how this ancient mythology can possibly exist during our technological, fact-hungry modern times. We have grand-Santa, who misses the days of sleighs and reindeers, and we have Steve, who rallies for high-tech gadgets to maximize the efficiency of the holiday. The answer the film provides comes organically from the heart of the story, full of nostalgia, without any distracting, didactic preaching.
Arthur Christmas is a surprisingly original Christmas film full of heart and wit. B+
