Arthur Christmas

1,397 words

Santa Claus and science fiction don’t typically go together, but the 2011 animated film Arthur Christmas proves they probably should—if you want to keep the Santa Claus legend up to date, that is. Arthur Christmas draws from Mission Impossible, The Incredibles, Apollo 13, Dr. Strangelove, and Star Trek as much as it does from Miracle on 34th Street or any other Christmas movie which calls into question the existence of Santa—and, by extension, the spirit of Christmas itself. Toss in a little Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Parenthood for some inter-generational family dynamics, and you have a delightful, sometimes thrilling, sometimes hilarious, and always entertaining Christmas movie which reveals itself to be something these kinds of movies rarely are: a coming of age story.

Director Sarah Smith, who co-wrote the screenplay with Peter Baynham, assembles all these disparate elements into a tone-perfect potpourri in Arthur Christmas, which should enter the pantheon of greatest Christmas movies of all time if it hasn’t already .

And the film is white. It is gloriously, gloriously white.

Its premise answers one question most kids ask when contemplating the logistical impossibilities and utter absurdities of the Santa Claus myth. Never mind the elves and the flying reindeer, how does an old fat guy in a red parka travel around the world and dole out nearly a billion presents in a single evening? Well, according to Arthur Christmas, Santa now relies on space-age technology in the form of a lightning-fast, semi-invisible, super-sleek flying vehicle called the S-1. It’s as big as a small town, as silent as the grave, and completely undetectable by eye or radar. In it, we have thousands of elves, all of whom are trained to do one thing: deliver presents. And boy, are they well-trained. They operate like commandos in teams of three, they have less than twenty seconds to get in and out of each home, they follow astonishingly detailed engagement protocols, and they’re equipped with enough Batman-like super gadgets to get them out of whatever pickle fate lands them in.

Back at the North Pole, beneath all the ice and polar bears, we have Santa’s vast and impossibly high-tech command center. You’d think this is where you’d find the old man, calling the shots over the planet-wide DARPA-like network he shares with his elvish army, but no. True to form, Santa (voiced by Jim Broadbent) is onboard the S-1 doing what his forefathers had done for centuries on Christmas. Unfortunately, age has been catching up with him and the world has been passing him by. He’s on his 70th mission, after all. By 2011 he’s nothing more than a bumbling, borderline-obese figurehead who can barely stay out of his underlings’ way as they feverishly do their jobs.

Back at mission control we get Steve, Santa’s oldest son (voiced by Hugh Laurie). As wide in the shoulders as Santa is in his belly, Steve is smart, tech savvy, and highly competent when it comes to remotely extricating the aforementioned elves from the aforementioned pickles. He thinks this is the year that his father will finally retire and bequeath to him the figurative reindeer reins he so justly deserves. The only problem is that Steve is a stuck up, metrosexual prig with a ghastly gray goatee who sees children as numbers, presents as units, and elves as cogs in his incomprehensibly complex and unerringly precise gift-giving enterprise. He also just loves himself some nice hot espresso. Can a guy like that actually become Santa Claus?

And his younger brother Arthur (voiced by James McAvoy) isn’t much better. In his fuzzy, blinking reindeer slippers, he’s just as bumbling and clueless as his father but without the excuse of age. Yet, he’s full of goodness and spirit, and this comes to the fore in the letter department where he corresponds with children from around the world and assures them that yes, Santa is real, and yes Santa loves them. His sense of humor is deliciously dorky, and he loves Christmas so much he can even sing “Silent Night” backwards. Yet because he can’t stop dropping things and tripping over elves in the command center, Steve has to banish him back to the letter office.

The final piece to this Christmas jigsaw is Grandsanta (voiced by Bill Nighy), the current Santa’s retired father and Steve and Arthur’s grandfather. He’s old—like, really, really old—and is constantly haranguing the young ‘uns about his heyday in the nineteenth century when Santa actually flew a sleigh with reindeer and crawled through chimneys and distributed handmade toys painted with lead-based paint. He’s cantankerous, obnoxious, sarcastic, and constantly inventing pejorative nicknames for his grandsons. He’s also loaded with stories, some of which, let’s say, are a tad dubious. Did you know that in the early 1960s, this retired Santa took his old sleigh (which he calls Evie) out for a spin and nearly caused World War III? “How did I know it was the Cuban Missile Crisis?” he complains.

When the three generations of Santa get together, there’s always friction as there is in most families. This gets smoothed over by the diplomatic Mrs. Claus (voiced by Imelda Staunton).However, in Arthur Christmas, ego plays a significant role, as Steve, Santa, and Grandsanta constantly vie for dominance. The only one who seems to remember what Christmas is really about is Arthur. But he’s at the bottom of the totem pole. He’s also afraid of heights, gets travel sickness, and claims he is allergic to snow. How is he going to make a difference?

He gets his chance when a fluke accident on the S-1’s assembly line causes Steve to miss one child—little Gwen Hines from Trelew, Cornwall. Since Santa is too tired to correct the error in time for Christmas morning, and Steve too cautious (or callous, take your pick), Arthur and Grandsanta take it upon themselves to break out old Evie and the reindeer to save the day for Gwen.

This is basically the story, and it’s wonderful. The pair, along with a stowaway “wrapping elf” named Byrony (voiced by Ashley Jensen), have misadventures in Toronto, Idaho, Mexico, the Atlantic Ocean, and in an African nature reserve where they nearly get eaten by lions. All of this happens within two hours. They also set off a global panic when the redundantly named “United Northern Federal International Treaty Alliance” detects them and thinks that Earth is being invaded by aliens.

The result of this misunderstanding can be seen in this still shot below—and tell me if you’ve ever seen a more striking image in an animated feature about Christmas:

As with most Christmas movies, Arthur Christmas is deeply conservative despite its ultramodern trappings. It pays homage to the passage of time, but insists that some things must never change—namely, love for family and maintaining a sense of innocence and wonder about the world. That’s really what Christmas is all about. Moreover, Arthur Christmas adds something unique to the genre with Arthur’s story arc from loveable klutz to Santa’s heir apparent. The script is also wickedly clever. For example, the magic dust which fuels Evie has a technical term: “potash of carboniloroxy anilocitrate.” The film is also loaded with sight gags. My favorite: the dusty tube of “chimney lube” found in Grandsanta’s old workshop. Really, in Arthur Christmas, you get one zinger after another.

Most importantly, the film actually walks the walk in its conservatism by keeping true to the European roots of Christmas. Portraits of Santas dating back a thousand years adorn the walls of mission control—and each Santa is white. The vast majority of the elves are white, as is Gwen and her family. Her town of Trelew is shown as a cozy hamlet, secluded within hills and centering around a majestic church. This is about as traditional and European as you can get. Further, when Arthur, Byrony, and Grandsanta have their escapades across the Western Hemisphere, you don’t actually see very many people since everyone is asleep. Thankfully there are no gratuitous nods to multiculturalism, immigration, or political correctness in Arthur Christmas.

I hope I am not giving away much of a spoiler when I say that there is a happy ending. More than this, however, the final words of Arthur Christmas are voice-over narration, which says, apropos to nothing, “And may one hundred percent of your Christmases be white.”

Amen.