Arthur Christmas (2011)
Directed by Sarah Smith
For hundreds of years, the Claus family has delegated the title "Santa" to a chosen few of its members, which can be passed down upon retirement. Each Christmas, Santa and his vast army of highly trained elves produce gifts and distribute them around the world in a one-night high-tech operation. However, when one of 600 million children to receive a gift from Santa on Christmas Eve is missed, it is deemed ‘acceptable’ to all but one—Arthur Claus, the current Santa’s misfit son deemed ineligible for the title, who executes an unauthorised rookie mission to get the last present halfway around the globe before dawn on Christmas morning.
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12 films that influenced Arthur Christmas
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Folks who worship at the altar of Aardman Animations as much as they do at the temple of Pixar (raising my hand here) will quickly realize — say, 20 minutes into the movie — that Arthur Christmas won't come close to matching the giddy heights of the British studio's Chicken Run or Wallace & Gromit films.
Their first release, 2000's " Chicken Run ," was quirky and heartwarming in the best sense of both terms, while 2005's " Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit " and 2006's " Flushed Away " left something to be desired, over calculated slapsticks with a quarter of the charm intended.
Aardman's sterling cinematic track record includes the award-winning adventures of Wallace & Gromit, "Chicken Run" and "Flushed Away."
This is surprising since Aardman Animations is also responsible for the more adult Wallace & Gromit adventures and "Chicken Run".
I'm also inclined to call it the best Aardman feature since Chicken Run all the way back in 2000, with all due respect to the charming but overlong Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and the overly polished Flushed Away ; it has a more ebullient sense of humor and playfulness, and while it's disappointing that it's CGI, not stop-motion, there's less than no value in complaining about that sort of thing.
The buzz: The first collaboration between Aardman (the brainy British studio behind “Wallace and Gromit” and “Chicken Run”) and Sony Pictures Animation (“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”) is a CG-animated holiday comedy with a clever concept and expertly selected voice cast (also including Imelda Staunton as Mrs. Santa).
Between his tree-shaped goatee and military uniform, Steve takes Christmas a little too seriously, running things like he would a military operation, which calls to mind the mismatched Zevo brothers of Barry Levinson's "Toys" (a holiday turkey perhaps only the folks at Aardman are generous enough to love).
This is a very British riff on yuletide mythology - Santa (Jim Broadbent) is addressed in private as "Malcolm" and the family bickering has some of the earthy flavour of Raymond Briggs' Father Christmas books.
The film was directed and co-written by Sarah Smith, a producer on the British sketch comedy "The League of Gentlemen" - and a practiced hand at black comedy.
Smith and Baynham come from daft grown-up British TV comedies like "The League of Gentlemen," "The Armando Iannucci Shows," and "I'm Alan Partridge," while their producing partners are from Aardman Animations -- i.e., the Wallace and Gromit people.
This sparkling bauble comes courtesy the folks at Aardman Animations (Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run), and writer/director Sarah Smith (Brit sketch comedy The League of Gentlemen) who have sprinkled the film with sly adult humour that will flurry over the heads of the younger audience members (including fun sight gags like a well-placed canister of “chimney lube”), ensuring that each repeat viewing is sure to unearth new comedic gems to appreciate.
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Aside from a snippet of Justin Beiber singing "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town" and an unorthodox rendition of "Silent Night," the music is all Harry Gregson-Williams.
"Arthur" begins with a "Mission: Impossible"-inspired sequence (great use of the 3-D technology) in which platoons of elves deliver billions of presents under the techno-obsessed leadership of Santa's eldest son, Steve (voiced by Hugh Laurie), who is itching to take over the family business.
Starting off by addressing the nagging question, “Just how exactly does Santa deliver all those presents over the course of one night?” the film depicts the seemingly impossible mission by doing it up Mission: Impossible style, complete with millions of elves schooled in covert ops and a hi-tech sleigh equipped with stealth cloaking technology.
With the help of the S-1, a giant red craft that brings to mind Independence Day, thousands of elves parachute or glide down a rope from the ship, depositing presents in every child’s home.
Battalions of elves swarm cities Special Forces-style, rappelling down from an Independence Day-sized sleigh-ceship to carpet-bomb suburban living rooms in a mechanized cheer campaign that's coordinated down to the millisecond .
Like "Flushed Away" (2006) but unlike the stop-motion Oscar-winning shorts and "Wallace & Gromit" adventures that established Aardman's reputation for quality, "Arthur Christmas" is digitally animated, so it lacks the charm of Aardman's signature Plasticine figures and Claymation-like environments.
Their first release, 2000's " Chicken Run ," was quirky and heartwarming in the best sense of both terms, while 2005's " Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit " and 2006's " Flushed Away " left something to be desired, over calculated slapsticks with a quarter of the charm intended.
With the exception of Pixar, no animation studio working today delivers more consistently enjoyable films than the folks at Aardman, and while they cut their teeth with the plasticine adventures of Wallace & Gromit and the birds of Chicken Run, Aardman demonstrated they could embrace computer animation and not lose the distinctive feel and personality of their work with 2006’s underappreciated Flushed Away.
The Aardman studios, previously responsible for “Flushed Away” (2006), “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” (2005), and “Chicken Run” (2000), again showcase their animators’ great attention to detail and wild visual imagination.
Aardman Animation, best known for the charming "Wallace and Gromit" cartoons, branched out from Plasticene stop-motion work to computer animation with Flushed Away (2006); this yuletide feature is the studio's second CGI project and the first in 3-D.
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Big screen Christmas animation is even more rare, with the only two recent standouts being the Robert Zemeckis-directed A Christmas Carol and The Polar Express .
Never have such ugly people been more beautifully lit, demonstrating how far Sony's technique has evolved since its work on Warner Bros.' "The Polar Express."
Sarah Smith’s yuletide caper, in contrast, has a different feel altogether: part Megamind , part The Polar Express , part Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs .
The plot, though, is recycled from the Vince Vaughn comedy Fred Claus (Santa's duties are assumed by a goofy relative, in this case son Arthur) and the old Rankin-Bass special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Arthur goes on a rogue expedition with a couple other misfits).