[rating: 3.5] All of us, as human brothers and sisters living together on the planet Earth, enter into a social contract with one another. One of the primary stipulations of that contract is that none of us will ever enjoy anything with a live action Tim Allen in it. It's for our own good and, really, it's just common sense. As remarkable as it seems, The Santa Clause forces us to violate the terms of that contract. But it doesn't seem that way from the start, believe me. Though it manages to redeem itself, the movie has to work hard to overcome the shakiness of its opening half hour. Tim Allen is Scott Calvin, a divorced toy company executive whose son, Charlie (Eric Lloyd), seems much happier with the new man in his mother's life than with his own father. (This new man happens to be Judge Reinhold. That seems to be a lateral move at best.) Charlie is spending Christmas Eve with Scott, but he's not particularly thrilled about it. In all these early scenes, before it becomes a movie about Tim Allen being Santa Claus, this unfortunately is just a movie about Tim Allen being Tim Allen, with all the unendurability and ...

[rating: 2] This is the hardest kind of review to write. When a movie is great, you can't wait to discuss it with the world and recommend it to everyone you meet. When something is painfully, unendurably awful, it inspires you to make humorous, rage-fueled observations. But when, like Tom and Jerry: A Nutcracker Tale, a movie is just sort of whatever, there isn't much to say. Granted, by comparison with yesterday's version of The Nutcracker, this thing is practically Citizen Kane. But on its own merits, the only word you can use to describe it is: meh. The cartoon is a very loose telling of the Nutcracker story, with Jerry the mouse taking on the duties of the title character. A pretty little ballerina has been kidnapped by the evil cat king, who has also usurped the leadership of Toyland. (It's sort of weird to use a mouse as the hero in a story where it's traditionally the villains who belong to the order rodentia, but there it is.) Jerry must rescue the imprisoned ballerina and depose the pretender to the throne. The cat king sends out troops—led, of course, by none other than Tom—to put a stop to Jerry's do-goodery. For the ...

[rating: 0] Before today, I didn't know anything about the Care Bears beyond the fact of their existence, and I sort of assumed that would stay true until the day I died. But now, having seen Care Bears: The Nutcracker (originally aired as Care Bears Nutcracker Suite), I know one thing for sure: I really wish I still didn't know anything about the Care Bears. This thing was just awful. To say it was the longest 61 minutes of my life doesn't begin to describe it—that would be akin to saying Abell 1835 IR1916 is pretty far away. Every moment of this cartoon was an exercise in torture both mental and physical, in maddening inanity, in record-breaking tedium. The story it tells is a loose approximation of "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King," but there are some Care Bears thrown into it, too. I don't even want to talk about it. Fuck this stupid cartoon. Here are some facts I learned about the Care Bears. 1. They are not all bears. There were definitely a lion and an elephant. In what sense an elephant can be considered a bear, I assure you I do not know. 2. The Care Bears fire rainbow-lasers out of their stomachs, ...

[rating: 5] Oh, man, here we go. This is the one you've been waiting for, the very first and very best of all the Rankin/Bass stop-motion puppet shows. In fact, with an annual broadcast every year since its premiere in 1964, it might be safe to call Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer the king of all Christmas specials. The show is worthy of all the devotion it gets—and even of some that other shows get. I rather suspect that at least some of the love people feel for the subsequent Rankin/Bass specials is actually residual adoration for Rudolph and Hermey and Yukon Cornelius. Of all the modern stories that are intended to expand on existing Christmas lore, this is the one that feels most natural, like an actual story waiting to be told rather than something more obviously expanded from a thin premise. The essential story is the same one told in the familiar song, an ugly duckling story with a nasally noteworthy reindeer instead of a Medusan waterfowl. Everyone laughs at Rudolph and his shiny proboscis and they bar him from participating in reindder games (is his nose's glow the result of steroid use, perhaps?), but ultimately Rudolph proves himself of value and saves ...

[rating: 2] Mickey Rooney returns as the voice of Santa Claus in this 1974 Rankin-Bass Christmas special, but instead of being the jolly, generosity-obsessed man we know from Santa Claus is Coming to Down, he's a cynical old turd. As the show starts, he decides he's not going to make his annual flight this year, in part because he feels the world is a cruel place lacking in Christmas spirit but mostly because he just doesn't feel like it and would rather stay in bed. I must say, this is a side of Santa we don't often see. However he rationalizes it to himself, his decision is final. Santa Claus ain't givin' presents to nobody this year! This is big news. Front page stuff. Now, I'm no professional journalist, but what in the hell kind of punctuation is that? "Santa says-" too tired! Somebody working at The Daily Tribune needs to consult his AP Style Manual, methinks. Don't quotation marks generally go around, you know, the quote part of something? And what the hell is that hyphen doing in there? But that's a digression. Mrs. Claus doesn't like her new lazy grouch of a husband, so she sends two elves, Jingle and Jangle, out into ...

[rating: 3] Here's how I imagine the creative process that led to Nestor, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey. "Hey, remember that Rudolph thing? People love it! We should do that but with, I don't know, a donkey." "A red-nosed donkey?" "That's a little on the nose, don't you think?" "Haw haw!" "No, we need something else, something like..." "Long ears?" "Perfect!" "But how does that help Santa? I guess if he flapped his ears he could help with the flying sleigh." "No, no, no good. Santa's sleigh isn't pulled by donkeys, people won't stand for it. We need someone Christmasey who could use a donkey." "...Jesus?" "Beautiful! I think somebody's earned himself Chinese takeout for lunch." Yes, this 1977 Rankin-Bass special is another story of a cute little animal with a physical deformity, in this case long ears. And I mean comically long. Long enough for Nestor, at one point, to ski down a hill on them. Because nobody wants to use this long-eared weirdo to do the usual donkey stuff, all of the other donkeys laugh and call him names. His human owner laughs at him, too. At every turn, Nestor is thoroughly shat upon. Of course, I imagine everything around him is thoroughly shat upon, too. He does live in a barn. Eventually his ...

[rating: 3] Everybody needs an origin story. Batman's got one, James Bond's got one, even Captain Kirk's got one. So you'd better believe Santa Claus has got one. Granted, it's a little strange to think of Santa, of all people, as a fresh faced youngster just starting on a promising career like, I don't know, Scarlett Johansson in Scoop, but there it is. Boy, that was a weird example, wasn't it? Anyway, that's not really important (though Scoop is a pretty good movie). Courtesy of our narrator, Fred Astaire, we learn the story of where Santa came from, how he met Mrs. Claus, how he came to deliver toys on Christmas Eve—just about everything you'd want to know about ol' Kris Kringle. It's almost as if Fred Astaire did some serious investigative reporting about Santa, like how in Scoop Scarlett Johansson is investigating Hugh Jackman. It turns out that Santa was once just a wee baby like the rest of us—a foundling, in fact, who was taken in by a family of toy-making midgets named the Kringles. And not just any toymakers, these Kringles. In days gone by they manufactured the greatest playthings in all the world and were the First Toymakers to the ...

[rating: 3.5] I quite like 1968's The Little Drummer Boy, one of the most enduring of the many Rankin Bass Christmas specials. In a way, it's representative of the contradiction of sorts in my relationship with Christmas as a whole. Though I'm militantly anti-theist, I'm totally gaga for Christmas and within Christmas I'm very fond of this little cartoon about Jesus. Of course, Jesus only puts in an appearance at the end of the show. The Little Drummer Boy is really the story, if you can believe it, of a little drummer boy. His name is Aaron and we first meet him as he's being kidnapped and forced to perform by an obese desert showman. We then learn that, some time before, people burned down his house and killed his parents. As a result, he hates all people and has love only for his animals, a camel a donkey and a sheep. (Sometimes Camels are buy-one-get-one-free at the Village Pantry, so I can understand his fondness for them. But donkeys and sheep?) So right in the first few minutes we've got kidnapping, slavery, murder, misanthropy, and an unnatural love for sheep. Merry Christmas! After enraging the crowd that has gathered to see him perform ...

[rating: 0] Have you ever thought to yourself What I'd really like to see is a direct-to-video Strawberry Shortcake Christmas cartoon made almost twenty years after the last time anybody cared about Strawberry Shortcake. Of course you haven't. You'd be certifiable if you did. And, yet, Berry, Merry Christmas exists. I know the depths of depravity to which humanity can sink—mass murders, the Stanford prison experiment, acts of terrorism, Catholicism—but I usually think I have a handle on it, that I understand what evil lurks in the hearts of men and have enough useful perspective on the matter to go about my life. Then I see something like Berry, Merry Christmas and realize that all past evils were mere throat-clearing in preparation for this, the main event. When you watch a Strawberry Shortcake cartoon, prepare to stare into the abyss and see only unending blackness staring back at you, crushing your spirit and leaving your soul as withered as a dead fig tree. In case you don't know, Strawberry Shortcake is a little red-headed girl who lives inside a piece of fruit and doesn't have any parents or guardians. She breaks into shocking non-sequitur songs, related to nothing that comes before or after them. ...

[rating: 4] I confess I was sorely afraid that Bah, HumDuck! A Looney Tunes Christmas would be untrue to its source material. Not to Dickens' A Christmas Carol—it's been adapted enough times and can handle a few deviations from the script. No, I worried this would besmirch the name of Looney Tunes by being only a pale imitation of the classic Warner Bros. cartoons we all love so much. I'm pleased to report that those fears were wholly unfounded. This little movie was just great. The story does play a little fast and loose with the specifics of A Christmas Carol, but that's just fine; fast and loose is the very essence of Looney Tunes. Here Daffy Duck is the cruel but staggeringly wealthy owner of a department store. He forces his employees—including his forever put-upon assistant manager Porky Pig—to work extra long hours with no overtime, heaps abuse on everyone he sees and, of course, hates holidays. That kind of miser is just asking for a haunting and that's what he gets, first in the form of the ghost of Sylvester the cat, the "unscrupulous CEO" who was Daffy Duck's idol. That's right, Sylvester is dead. Squashed by a forklift, in fact. Sylvester warns ...