Scholastic: A Night Before Christmas (with Hannukah and Kwanzaa)
Posted on December 7, 2009 at 8:00 am
A-
Lowest Recommended Age:
All Ages
MPAA Rating:
NR
Profanity:
None
Alcohol/ Drugs:
None
Violence/ Scariness:
Mild peril
Diversity Issues:
Diverse characters
Date Released to DVD:
2009
My very favorite series has a special family treat for the winter holidays. Clement Moore’s classic poem about Santa Claus is read by Anthony Edwards. Theodore Bikel reads “In the Month of Kisley,” a delightful Hannukah story about a poor but happy family who teach a wealthy man the meaning of the holiday, featuring some clever insights into family happiness and a very wise judge. In “Seven Candles for Kwanzaa,” the Pinkney’s story and illustrations teach us the values of family, history, and community that each of the nights of the holiday symbolize, with Alfre Woodard narrating. Ed Martinez tells us about how Maria might have lost her mother’s ring in the “Too Many Tamales” she is making for Christmas dinner (Spanish and English narration). The set also includes three other Christmas stories: “Max’s Christmas,” “Morris’s Disappearing Bag,” and “The Little Drummer Boy.”
My parents were very strict about television, but this was one of the few shows they let us watch. They not only let us — they watched with us. It was one of the first television shows for children to have jokes for adults. As I grew up, there were innumerable times when I would learn something new and suddenly have the retroactive pleasure of understanding some past Rocky and Bullwinkle joke. There’s an opera called “Boris Godunov?” Aha! That explains the name of R&B bad guy Boris Badanov! And remember the name of their alma mater? Wassamata U? Remember “fan mail from some flounders?” And “watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat?” (“That trick never works!”)
Few people today will get the joke about the Kerward Derby (a play on the name of then-minor-celebrity Durward Kirby), but this is still purely delightful.
And of course I always had a special fondness for Dudley Do-Right because his leading lady was named Nell.
Pixar movies are beautiful to look at, but what takes your breath away is the story. They don’t rely on fairy tales or best-selling books with pre-sold stories and characters we are already attached to. And, as if challenging themselves to make it even harder, they take on increasingly unlikely protagonists — a gourmet rat, an almost-wordless robot, and now a cranky old man, and somehow they make us fall in love with them.
In some ways, this is the oldest and most enduring of tales, the story of a journey. And this is one that started a long time ago. A brief prologue introduces us to Carl and Ellie, a boy and girl who dream of adventure. They pledge to follow their hero, explorer Charles Muntz, to see Paradise Falls in South America.
Then they grow up and get married and life intervenes. He sells balloons and she works with birds. They save for their trip but keep having to use the money for un-adventuresome expenses like repairing the roof. Then Ellie dies, and Carl (voice of Ed Asner) is left alone. Developers are closing in on his little house. He just can’t bear to lose anything more. And so he takes the one thing he has and the one thing he knows and ties so many balloons to his house that it lifts, yes, up into the sky, so he can follow Muntz to Paradise Falls at last.
But he does not realize he has an inadvertent stowaway. Russell (voice of Jordan Nagai), a pudgy, trusting, and irrepressibly cheerful little Wilderness Adventure scout who needs to assist an elderly person so that he can get a badge. They arrive in South America and as they pull the house, still aloft, toward Paradise Falls, they meet an exotic bird, talking dogs, and several kinds of danger, and have to rethink some of what they thought they knew and some of what they thought was most important to them.
The visuals are splendid, making subtle but powerful use of the 3D technology to make some scenes feel spacious and some claustrophobic. Carl and his world are all rectangles, Russell all curves. The Tabletop Mountains-inspired landscapes are stunning and the balloons are buoyant marvels, thousands of them, each moving separately but affecting all of the others, the shiny crayon dots of pure color amid the dusty rock and the earth tones of Carl’s wrinkles, gray hair, and old clothes. The other glowing colors on screen are the iridescent feathers of the bird, inspired by the monal pheasant.
There are a couple of logical and chronological inconsistencies that are distracting. But the dogs, with special collars that allow them to give voice to the canine purity of their feelings, are utterly charming — and there is a clever twist to keep the scariest one from being too scary. Another pleasure of the film comes from the way the precision of the graphic design is matched by some welcome and very human messiness in the story. Everything is not resolved too neatly but everything is resolved with a tenderness and spirit that is like helium for the heart.
The Pearson family: mom, dad (SNL and “Weeds” vet Kevin Nealon), love-struck teen queen Bethany (“HSMs” Ashley Tisdale), sulky middle child Tom (Carter Jenkins), cute sock-monkey-clutching kid Hannah (Ashley Boettcher) are joined in their vacation home by their grandmother (Doris Roberts of “Everybody Loves Raymond”), uncle (Andy Richter), and cousins, aggressive Jake (Austin Robert Butler of “Zooey 101”) and gamer twins (Henri and Regan Young). Tom is not happy with himself, with being away from his computer, with having to go fishing, with any of his family, and especially with the uninvited arrival of Bethany’s boyfriend Ricky (Robert Hoffman), who seems able to fool everyone but Tom with his good manners and preppy appearance. And then there are the aliens in the attic, four little green creatures with many arms who have come in search of something they need to take over the planet. One of their most potent weapons is a mind-enslaving dart that turns humans into remote-controlled zombie slaves.
But it only works on adults.
And so the kids have to learn how to work together to protect the grown-ups and the planet. What works best in the film are the special effects, clearly the primary focus as the talented cast, including Tisdale and SNL vet Tim Meadows, get less attention than the CGI and wire work. The gamer expert twins use the Wii-style remote to manipulate the zombified Ricky and grandma, the kids have to assemble weapons with whatever they have on hand, and the aliens turn off the gravity and get tangled in a Slinky. A lot of slapstick and a little crude humor went a long way with the kids in the audience and there were frequent hoots of delighted laughter. I could hear some of the punchlines repeated and stored for later use. (That last point is as much a warning as an endorsement.)
This third in the Ice Age series is a bit sweeter and gentler than the first two, perhaps less ambitious in scope than the first but much more engaging than the second. The 3D animation is beautifully immersive and the story is exciting but so low-key that everyone, even the scary dinosaurs with the big teeth, ends up happy.
Again this is the story of woolly mammoth Manny (Ray Romano), sloth Sid (John Leguizamo), and saber tooth tiger Diego (Denis Leary), now joined by Manny’s mate Ellie (Queen Latifah), who is about to have a baby. Everything seems settled and happy, but of course we would not have a story unless everything got unsettled pretty quickly. Diego is feeling left out and worried about getting older and less powerful, so he decides to leave the makeshift “tribe” they all think of as family. Sid finds three huge eggs and immediately adopts them, his nesting instinct so over the top that he insists he is their mother. The eggs hatch, and at first the little dino babies happily follow Sid around like ducklings, though they are not entirely on board with the idea of vegetarianism. But then their mommy dinosaur comes to get them, grabbing Sid along with her chicks, and pending childbirth or not, Sid, Manny, Ellie, and Diego go off to rescue him.
They end up in an underground portal to a place where the weather is temperate and the dinosaurs still rule. “I thought those guys were extinct,” one of our heroes comments. (Note that in real life the last Ice Age was about 20 thousand years ago and the last dinosaurs were about 65 million years ago, but what the heck, animals do not talk or build playgrounds, either.) There they meet up with an off-beat piratical weasel named Buck (Simon Pegg), who teaches them some survival skills and leads them to Sid. Along the way, they have a number of adventures, and yes, that baby decides to arrive at just the wrong place and time, but despite some chases, several falls, and one near-ingestion by a hungry plant, everyone ends up happy and healthy.
Children and their parents will enjoy the portrayals of family life. “You’re trying to childproof nature,” Ellie chides Manny as his approaching fatherhood brings literally home to him the dangers of the world. And they will enjoy Buck’s rakish antics and the traditional subplot about the prehistoric squirrel Scrat and his perpetual quest for the elusive acorn. This time, his biggest impediment is a long-lashed female, who outsmarts him at every turn.
Scrat’s romantic confusion is a lot of fun, but there is a sense that the folks behind this movie are not evolved enough to think of the female characters as anything other than wise and nurturing — and a little bossy. Ellie’s job in the movie is to be the grown-up; apparently even in pre-historic times the females were more, uh, evolved. Not as funny, however.
But the sweet nature of this film is engaging and the adorable characters designed by illustrator Peter de Seve make this movie both satisfying and fun. The squirrels’ tar pit dip, romantic tango, and post-romantic home-decorating session, Sid’s efforts to mother the adorable dinosaur babies, and a nimble balance of action and humor make this one of the best family films of the year.
series is a bit sweeter and gentler than the first two, perhaps less ambitious in scope than the first but much more engaging than the second. The 3D animation is beautifully immersive and the story is exciting but so low-key that everyone, even the scary dinosaurs with the big teeth, ends up happy.