To dispatch with the pleasantries and get straight to the but: Arthur Christmas favors the late-century style of computer animation that turns characters into smooth, plasticky dirigibles, adding a Made-in-China cello-skin to faces and scenery alike and vacuum-sealing the works for maximum digital freshness. I’ve never cared for the look — if cartoons could be embalmed, that’s how I imagine they’d be — and in sharing a release weekend with a Muppets revival, the limits of Arthur’s CGI puppeteering seem even more stark. That is of course, until you consider almost everything outside of my but — which may well not be yours — which is to say the near-total mitigation of aesthetic bummers with an avalanche of charm, wit, and enlivening, highly oxygenated performances.
A collaboration between Sony animation and Britain’s Aardman productions (of Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run, and Flushed Away fame), Arthur Christmas is a Grinch-style story of rekindled Christmas spirit told from inside Santa’s compound at the North Pole. At one end of the investment spectrum are Santa’s ebullient but highly errant progeny Arthur (James McAvoy) and a million or so obsessive elves, and at the other are Santa himself (Jim Broadbent), a glory hound who’s been phoning it in for years, and Santa’s number one son, Steve (Hugh Laurie), a technocrat who has “festivized” the entire world and broken toy delivery down into a joyless martial art. In the middle is Mrs. Claus (Imelda Staunton), the stealthy home executive who just wants everybody to get along, and out back in the polar…
Full Story »
