Saying that something “feel like Christmas” is at once profoundly and definitively true, and yet gloriously and warmly intangible too.
Such is the season which all but dominates the final two months of the year, and realistically longer if you count the eagerness of retailers to make the most of a big spending festival, a time which exists in reality as much it does in popular imagination, and which too often falls victim to myth over truth.
We say “falls victim” because while all those chestnuts roasting and sleigh rides and most wonderful time of the year utterances feel like a seasonal hug for a weary soul, they also feel ephemeral too, prone to vanish into the mist the moment real life pokes its inconveniently gritty nose in.
The sheer joy of That Christmas, an animated gem destined to be a modern festive classic, is that it captures how magically alive the season can be while being sagely honest about what can go wrong and whether there’s any way to counter all that going south dynamic with some quite tangibly north facing.
Directed by Simon Otto to a screenplay Richard Curtis (the man who, among gems, gave us Love, Actually which is used rather inventively and self deprecatingly in the film) and Peter Souter, and based on That Christmas and Other Stories by Curtis himself, the film is set in the small cosy community of Wellingon-on-Sea, a seaside town (yeah, the name kind of gives that away) in which a new kid in town, Danny Williams (Jack Wisniewski) is trying to figure out his new life after his devoted mum’s (Jodie Wittaker) divorce from Danny’s now very absent and negligent dad.
Danny is in love from afar with classmate Sam Beccles (Zazie Hayhurst) – she is one half of a set of twins with Charlie, voiced by Sienna Sayer, who appears naughty, and registers as such with naughty but who may be nicer than she appears – and very much alone as his mum, a nurse, takes every shift she can to keep their new two-person family financially afloat.
His is not necessarily a bleak existence since he and his mum are close, but he hasn’t really made inroads at school, his teacher, Miss Trapper (Fiona Shaw) is austere and tough, and he’s struggling with his grades, unable to get past the emotional pain in his life.
That’s quite a lot of reality at a time of year that’s not supposed to have any, right?
Right, but that is the heart and soul of That Christmas which, like many of the good Christmas stories out there, knows how dark and unforgiving life can be, and which also understands that some snow and the prospect of Santa (Brian Cox) arriving – the man in red acts as a warmhearted and knowingly thoughtful and caring narrator, one of the many delights of the movie – which he does in spectacularly fun fashion with his sole complaining, red-nosed reindeer Dasher (Guz Khan), won’t solve everything.
But, and this is key, it may solve just enough to make things better, and that could then set in motion some wonderfully uplifting Christmas spirit and togetherness which could transform an already lovely town into something even more lastingly good (as Santa sagely points out, the really good from Christmas should last throughout the year).
As a group of parents head out on Christmas Eve to a wedding in an old Kombi van called Beyoncé – the McNutts (Rhys Darby and Lolly Adefope respectively), the joyously sardonic Mrs. Mulji (Sindhu Vee) and the Forrests (Katherine Parkinson and Alex McQueen respectively) – leaving their five kids, who always celebrate Christmas together as a set of three families, it looks like Wellington-on-Sea is set for yet another same-old, same-old Christmas.
While the parents love that, the kids do not, and led by Bernadette “Bernie” McNutt (India Brown), who directs a highly amusing and Curtis-goofy school play which features organic vege farmers instead of shepherds and thus kids dressed as broccoli, they decide to embark on a very non-normal Christmas when a massive Christmas hits the area, leaving them to their own celebratory devices while the parents struggle to get home in weather that is making life difficult for everyone.
Filled with running gags like escaped farm turkeys on the run, and verbal gigs and slapstick that work hand-in-hand to provide buoyantly quirky humour to neatly counter the more serious elements of the film, That Christmas does not put a foot-in-the-snow wrong, delivering up a film that is suitably, idiosyncratically balmy but which also hits hard when it comes to the grim realities of life and how lonely otherwise connected can be.
Take Danny who, like most of the town, cowers in awe and fear of the Miss Trapper who gets things done, true, but who cannot be said to be close to anyone, her countenance impervious to even the slightest cracks of humanity, festive or otherwise.
But as events in That Christmas unfold, equal parts heartrendingly sad and gloriously funny, she and Danny come together in the most heartfelt of ways, and it’s this unexpected connection which fuels some of the final acts most beautiful and heart-swelling moments.
Yes, there is a lot of real life happening to people in Wellingon-on-Sea and no, none of it is particularly good or easily fixed, and That Christmas doesn’t pretend it can be, BUT, and this is a crucial conjunction, it can be made better, and often in the most extraordinary but grounded of ways.
That is the joy and hope of gorgeously animated feature (it is delightful in all its ways) That Christmas which is the ultimate love letter to the power of the season to changes lives and transform communities, at turns honest to its core and grim in its outlook, but also playfully heartwarming and uplifting, as apt to use Brussels sprouts as items of garrulous Christmas play as it is to have a sardonic reindeer complaining about all and sundry to hugely amusing effect, which knows how tough things can be but how good too, and which serves up a reassuring sense that Christmas can truly fix what’s broken, and keep it whole then throughout the year to community building and life-changing effect.
That Christmas streams on Netflix.