As a medium with traditional appeal to children, cartoon art has a long connection with Christmas. Indeed, it was the great 19th century editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast who established our visual image of Santa Claus.
Growing up I looked forward to the great Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo‘s annual renditions of its own trademark Christmas carol, “Deck Us All with Boston Charlie” (sometimes accompanied by its canine variant, “Bark Us All Bow-Wows of Folly,” leading to not-so-scholarly debates in the strip as to which version was more authentic). Kelly’s carol was popular enough that he even named one of his paperback collections after it. In Kelly’s Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo (1959), a formative text for my interest in comics, he suggests that his carol “probably has something to do with my personal animosity towards those who worship the buck rather than the reindeer.” (Go back and read that sentence again if you missed the clever pun; Kelly, like Shakespeare and Joyce, made punning an art form rather than an occasion for groaning.) This, as we shall see, is a recurring theme in works in this week’s column.
Still, Kelly’s explanation may be a little baffling until one reaches a later point in the book, in which Albert the Alligator attempts a close textural analysis of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” In his commentary, Kelly complains, “Our idle, head-ringing indulgence in most old Christmas carols. . .has always reminded me of the primitive worship by some aboriginal tribes of fetishes and gods to which they were not properly introduced. I am willing to wager that not more than one person in a hundred has the slightest idea what a lot of the “quaint and richly meaningful’ old songs about the Christmas holidays are all about.” (Just who is King Wenceslaus, anyway?) Having asked Churchy La Femme (a turtle whose name is a pun on French) to play the role of “my true love” in “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” Albert thunders in Kelly’s dialect for his Okeefenokee Swamp menagerie, “But you sends constant every day another dogbone partridge in a pear tree! What’s you doin’? Cleanin’ out yo’ attic?” (Churchy, into his part and looking hurt, responds in a small voice, “I jes’ wants you to allus remember me.”)
The point of “Deck Us All with Boston Charlie” may be satiric, but it also embodies the sheer joy of cleverly composed nonsense, suitable to holiday revelry, and Kelly, who put it on his Christmas cards, clearly loved it as much as his characters. As he also notes in Ever-Lovin, he is not opposed to these old carols: “I like singing, hollering, falling down, mistletoe and all sorts of Christmas sports.”
In this column we will look at a variety of Christmas stories, both in comics and in animation, and both new and old. But we will start out with a collection of children’s stories which are not about Christmas, but whose lead story fits into this week’s topic nonetheless.
I’VE GOT A LITTLE LIST
The new hardcover comics collection Little Lit 3: It Was a Dark and Silly Night. . ., which came out this fall from HarperCollins, is more in keeping with the Halloween spirit than that of Christmas. This is the third anthology of comics stories for small children edited by Art Spiegelman, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus and Francoise Mouly, art editor of The New Yorker. Little Lit 3 is billed as a “Raw Junior Book,” evoking the name of the groundbreaking alternative comics magazine that Spiegelman and Mouly edited in the 1980s, and the Little Lit books likewise steer away from conventional mainstream styles of cartoon art. (Original art for Little Lit 3 was the subject of an exhibit this December by New York’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art.)
My favorite story in Little Lit 3 may be appropriate to the season, though, since it is set amid the snows of winter. This is the lead story in the book, a collaboration between comics artist Richard Sala and Lemony Snicket, the author of the series of popular and macabre children’s books known as A Series of Unfortunate Events. In this Little Lit tale the protagonist, a young girl named Lucretia, sees a Yeti, the Abominable Snowman of myth, outside her window. It looks like a monster, or like the snow taken form as a humanoid creature, as if it were a wintry version of DC’s Swamp Thing, a man turned into an elemental. Perhaps it looks like the embodiment of winter in its negative aspects: frigid and forbidding. I once took a course about Moby Dick that dealt with the use of the color white to create a sense of dread, as in Melville’s white whale, or the barren Antarctic wastes in Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (which figures in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), and, I would now add, the final third of The X-Files movie. Winter is symbolically the season of death. (This applies to superhero fantasy as well: the villains Captain Cold, Mr. Freeze, and Killer Frost, whose name makes it explicit, are symbolic death figures. Even the X-Men’s Iceman is often shown freezing his opponents into immobility within blocks of ice. The blond-haired Captain America, preserved in suspended animation within a block of ice for decades, was a symbolic sun god in the grip of winter and death.)
So this Yeti is a Shadow figure, embodying frightening aspects of existence that have been excluded from the life that Lucretia leads in her comfortable, warm, well-lit home. But the Shadow, in Jungian psychology, is not necessarily evil. Lucretia does not regard this snowman as “abominable,” but instead “somewhat intelligent, largely laconic, and a little lonely.” (Mr. Snicket has advised us at the story’s start that he is treating “silly,” as in “It was a dark and silly night,” as an acronym for this phrase, suggesting that what some regard as silly actually has deeper meaning.)
Moreover, the Yeti knocks at the door, and it attempts to communicate with Lucretia, though, inside her house, she can barely hear it. So it is a herald, out of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, issuing a call to adventure.
Snicket tells us that “Lucretia was a little lonely herself,” indicating a link between herself and the monster. Lucretia sees the Yeti through a pane of glass: can this, metaphorically, be like looking through a mirror at one’s reflection?
A recurring theme in children’s stories is that of the child who sees and knows things that the adults do not; we saw this motif in Neil Gaiman’s The Wolves in the Walls in a previous column. In J. K. Rowling’s books, the motif turns up in the form of the Muggles, the people comprising the majority of society, who either do not know about the existence of magic or, like Harry Potter’s nasty uncle, aunt and cousin, consciously try to stamp it out. This theme surely is meant to encourage children, as they grow older, to have confidence in asserting their own points of view and needs despite the opposition of those who would hold them back; actually, this is not a bad lesson for adults, either. Lucretia’s parents tell her she did not see a Yeti, denying the existence of something without even bothering to investigate, and dismiss her interpretation of the creature as intelligent. When Lucretia says she heard it knock on the door, they tell her it was only the wind: they thereby deny that she heard a call to adventure. When she says she would “prefer to find out for myself,” in other words, to follow the call, her mother tells her, “We don’t always get what we prefer.” This reminds me of Campbell in his PBS interviews talking about a parent who said he had never done what he had wanted to and wasn’t about to let his son follow his bliss, either. Lucretia’s teacher also refuses to believe she saw a Yeti and discourages her from her intent to “try and talk to it.”
But, Snicket notes, seeing the Yeti “was the first exciting thing that had happened ” to Lucretia in years, and, indeed, her life at home and school do look dull, much like the family life in The Wolves in the Walls. No wonder she was looking away from the interior of her house and out the window, as if longing for something different.
Despite all this discouragement from these threshold guardians blocking her path, Lucretia persists in her determination to answer the call, and that night (night being the time when the unconscious comes to the surface, as Gaiman’s Sandman knows well), she ventures out in search. Lucretia crosses a literal threshold by climbing out the window, and, since we’ve already linked the window glass to mirrors, she has in effect gone through the looking glass, like that other determined female adventurer, Lewis Carroll’s Alice.
Lucretia thinks she spots the Yeti twice but proves to be wrong; since stories like to work in threes, her third try proves successful, though she does not think so at first. What she thought was the Yeti proves to be the opening of a small cave in the shape of the snow creature, and she goes in. Well, a cave can represent the mind (as in Plato) and more specifically the subconscious/unconscious mind. Going inside would also be a metaphorical descent into the underworld, which is not necessarily a bad thing: heroes in Greek and Roman mythology journey into the land of the dead to gain knowledge. It’s a symbolic entrance into the “belly of the beast,” a form of symbolic death that precedes rebirth. I suppose that a cave (mistaken for a furry creature!) could also represent female sexuality, but this is a Christmas column about works for family audiences, so I will not say more about that here!
Within the cave Lucretia finds another girl, who is bigger and presumably older than herself, and whom Richard Sala draws to look just like Lucretia, albeit with a Princess Leia/Dunkin’ Donuts hairdo. In other words, this older girl, who, significantly is not named, is another mirror image, Lucretia’s potential older self.
The older girl begins by extending help to Lucretia, offering her soup to fend off the winter cold. Lucretia finds it “delicious,” unlike any other soup (nourishment,. spiritual as well as material?) she’s had before. The older girl says it is made from the bark of trees – part of the natural world – and that her parents had told her that “tree bark soup tasted terrible, but I wanted to find out for myself.” In other words, the older girl’s relationship with her parents duplicates Lucretia’s, and they share the desire to learn for themselves. And that urge for learning what they want to contrasts with the deadly dull schoolroom we’ve seen earlier.
The older girl likewise confesses to having been bored at school, to staring out the window at home, and feeling lonely. Then, one day, the older girl says, she too saw a Yeti, thought it seemed intelligent, was told by her parents that the Yeti did not exist, and, repeating the phrase from earlier, “wanted to find out for myself.” Do we need more proof that these two girls are symbolically the same person at different ages? (Here I think of Stephen King’s The Shining, in which the little boy is advised by a voice that proves to be that of his older self, who symbolically and potentially already resides in his mind.)
Now here comes an odd twist: the older girl says she has never yet found the Yeti, but she’s nonetheless “happy” living in the cave, away from the “village” – society – where she used to dwell. Now, the older girl serves as another Campbellian figure, the mentor, and she guides Lucretia into the snowy wilderness. Note that once Lucretia begins collecting bark (for soup/nourishment) herself, the older girl is seen no more; that is because Lucretia is now on her way to becoming the older girl.
And now there is another strange twist. As Lucretia wanders she becomes covered with the falling snow. Feeling cold, she seeks refuge at a cabin and knocks on the door. Mr. Snicket does not say that this is Lucretia’s family’s home, but inside we see her father, mother, and baby brother, in exactly the positions and clothes in which they first appeared. Theirs is a world of stasis, that one apparently has to leave in order to grow spiritually. Perhaps the fact that Snicket does not explicitly refer to the cabin as Lucretia’s home means that she has already psychologically moved beyond it.
The baby brother hears the knock – another call – and sees Lucretia, whom he believes to be a Yeti. Lucretia tries to speak to her brother, but is unable to make herself understood. The parents, as usual, don’t look and deny there are such things as Yetis.
Now this is strange. Lucretia has become a “Yeti” herself. She has not really turned into a monster: she is still herself, beneath the figurative “mask” and “costume” of snow. But here I am reminded of Disney’s Brother Bear, and its implication that once you cross the threshold and are transformed, you cannot go back (despite what Campbell claims). Moreover, since you have chosen to leave behind conventional means of thinking and behaving, the old society that you left behind, like Rowling’s Muggles, cannot recognize you (as with the boy turned bear in the Disney film), refuse to acknowledge your changed self (as with Lucretia’s parents), or regard you as an alien outsider, a kind of monster. Lucretia has merged with the Shadow, the figure of the Yeti, but discovered that the Shadow actually represented her own spiritual potential that was being stifled by her family and teacher.
So Lucretia leaves the cabin behind forever, finds a cave to live in, makes herself bark soup from a recipe she devised herself, and is happy: she has become her older self.
The other girl never found the Yeti, and Lucretia does not seem to realize that she has become a Yeti in the eyes of others. But perhaps that is because Lucretia does not regard herself as a monster; instead, she has become her true self. If one interprets the image of the Yeti as the call to a life of adventure, or, rather, to a life of following one’s true and personally fulfilling path, then perhaps Lucretia will never find the Yeti because she will never come to the end of the path. It is the journey that is important, not reaching the end, and there will always be more to strive after.
According to Campbell’s monomyth and Northrop Frye’s theories, the returning hero gathers a redeemed community, or a new, more vital community about himself. But Lucretia lives alone and likes it, because she is following her own path, which she finds satisfying, even if no one else does. I prefer the idea of finding a community of like-minded spirits, but, having a solitary side myself, I can see Snicket’s point. (Perhaps she has jumped to what Frye considers the last stage of a hero’s life, as the wise old man living in an isolated tower, an image that reminds me of Steve Englehart’s interpretation of the warlord Kang’s ultimate self, Immortus, in Marvel’s Avengers, which in turn reminds me of Shakespeare’s Prospero.)
And in the final panel, Lucretia’s little brother has crossed the window threshold and gone out into the snow, seeking the Yeti. So will there eventually be a community of the like-minded? More likely, I think, the brother, representing yet another generation, will discover his own unique path, his own recipe for tree bark soup, if you like.
Snicket’s story is by far the best in the book. Taking second place is a worthy runner-up, illustrated with macabre humor by the great Gahan Wilson, and written by the ubiquitous Neil Gaiman, whose prolific output is itself Endless. When I reviewed his The Wolves in the Walls I observed that there was actually something appealing about the high-spirited partying of the supposed Shadow figures, the wolves. In his story in this book, the child protagonists instead join forces with the Shadow figures in order to celebrate.
In Wolves, the human hero took a stand against the messiness and disorder perpetrated by the wolves. In this Little Lit story, though, it is the parents, portrayed as faceless, repressive figures, who don’t want their children, Edgar and Goneril (named, oddly, after the children of authoritarian parents in King Lear), to have a party because of the mess and noise they caused the last time. “You and your friends made enough noise to wake the dead,” the mother says, significantly. Also, significantly, Edgar says they need a place where people don’t mind noise, or making a mess with Jell-O, “or people having fun.” Their parents have forbidden not only disorder but fun (much like the dictator in Basil Wolverton’s story elsewhere in the book).
The kids leave home, not for good like Lucretia, and journey to the place they’ve chosen for their party, the cemetery, which is about to prove to be a literally enchanted realm. The kids have entered the land of death, but their youthful play fills it with life, and hence they make enough noise to literally wake the dead. Corpses rise from their graves, and are obvious shadow figures; the children are initially frightened. But these dead adults want to join in the festivities: they may look like skeletons and decaying bodies (though made comically appealing by Wilson), but they have, in a sense, been resurrected. The revived dead adults prove to be livelier than the living adult parents. The dead are childlike, too: one of them hits Edgar with Jello-O as a parting salute. The kids leave this enchanted world, and cross the threshold back into their homes, where their mom has not changed, but Edgar, having brought back the memory of his party in the land of the dead, winks knowingly at the reader.
Whenever I watch rebroadcasts of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, I see new relevance in things that Campbell said. When in one episode he observed that death gods are often also gods of sex, a connection that Richard Wagner, for one, would agree with, I thought of Gaiman’s Death character. There’s another reason why he made her a sexually appealing young woman. I think, too, that Gaiman seeks to make actual death less frightening through the depiction of his cheerful, empathetic Death character. This Little Lit tale likewise seems meant to help dispel fears of mortality.
Kaz’s story, drawn in an underground comics style, takes a different kind of amused look at a child’s need to rebel against his parents. Embarrassed that his parents live in an upside-down house, the young protagonist is shocked when an accident turns the house right-side-up and “normal,” but turns all the other homes in the neighborhood upside down. He isn’t happy until he discovers that he is actually a dog, and thus of different species than the rest of his family.
Most of the other stories deal less in strong plots with psychological insight than in gentle whimsy. There’s a tale by J. Otto Seibold and Vivian Walsh that stars two lookalike penguins, one of whom is Martini from their Christmas-themed creation Olive, the Other Reindeer. (I recently watched the charming animated Olive special on Cartoon Network, and especially liked the warmth and brightness that Drew Barrymore put into voicing the title role.) A number of the stories draw upon the cartooning styles of the early decades of the 20th century. Jumpin’ Jupiter, drawn by Basil Woolverton in 1952 and reprinted here, looks like a bridge between the style of his predecessor, Popeye creator E. C. Segar in the 1930s, and that of Robert Crumb in the 1960s. William Joyce’s contribution, presented as if it were a “Comic Supplement to the New York American” newspaper from 1909, handsomely evokes the style of Winsor McCay and his contemporaries.
The collection’s concluding tale, written and drawn by Patrick McDonnell of the comic strip Mutts, is surely influenced by George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. It presents an animist universe, where not only are animals sentient and able to talk, but so is the moon, which peers over the horizon, afraid to come fully into view. The moon, it seems, is afraid of the dark and howls like a terrified child. An owl, the traditional symbol of wisdom, points out to the moon, “But you are the light,” and persuades it to rise, whereupon its brightness dispels the darkness. And this seems an apt metaphor: simply resolving to be brave will help put the causes of fear to flight.
MUTTS IN A MUSEUM
Shortly after I wrote this section of this column, I visited an exhibition Mutts: The Comic Art of Patrick McDonnell at the Society of Illustrators’ Museum of American Illustration in New York City. It was a good day to go, since McDonnell himself was present, holding court for friends. (Now that rarely happens to me: seeing an artist at his own one-man show at a museum. It was like when I was looking through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s retrospective of the work of photographer Richard Avedon and spotted Avedon himself walking through the exhibit, apparently unrecognized by most of the visitors admiring his work.)
It was a pleasure to be able to study so many examples of McDonnell’s graphic inventiveness and humor (including, appropriately for this column, some pleasant Christmas strips). I was particularly intrigued by the way in which he draws certain panels involving his characters in the styles of other comic strip artists (like Chester Gould, Rube Goldberg, and E. C. Segar), as recreations of the covers of landmark comic books (Action Comics #1, Flash Comics #1 from 1940 and even R. Crumb’s Zap Comix#1; he even slips some Marvel references into his dialogue at times), and in the styles of fine artists (Klimt, Magritte, Matisse, even Hiroshige and Jackson Pollock). This is all fun, while also serving the worthy purpose of placing comic strips on an artistic continuum with “fine art.”
A wonderful supplement to the exhibit was the inclusion of original art by cartoonists whom McDonnell admires, and who clearly influenced his graphic and storytelling styles. Having already written about Herriman’s apparent influence on McDonnell, I felt rewarded by seeing two Krazy Kat Sunday strip originals on display. One was yet another of Herriman’s seemingly infinite clever variations on the gag of Ignatz Mouse hitting Krazy lovingly/hatingly with a brick. The other opposed a long panel in which the stork tells Krazy about the actual, ignoble circumstances of other cast members’ births, while alongside ran a comics narrative in which those same characters boastfully lied about their princely pasts. There was a very early Harold Gray Little Orphan Annie from 1925, and a striking 1953 Chester Gould Dick Tracy depicting a femme fatale and her milieu in handsome contrasts of black and white. In a 1935 E. C. Segar Thimble Theatre strip, Popeye amusingly bemoaned his new career as a dictator, inspiring me to wonder how Segar would satirize present day tyrants like the recently captured Saddam. There was a handsome illustration by Winnie the Pooh’s original artist, Ernest Shepard. There was also a late example of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, a 1993 Sunday strip, combining humorous bursts of action with quietly elegant compositions. It was seeing a master at the height of his form (and there will be much more about Schulz later in this column.)
The oldest comics artwork in the show was a 1924 original Mutt and Jeff by Bud Fisher. Anticipating later sequences of the same sort by such cartoonists as Chuck Jones (In Duck Amuck), Al Capp (in Li’l Abner) and John Byrne (in She-Hulk), and paralleling Max Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell animated cartoons, this particular example of the strip had Mutt and Jeff interacting with their creator, asking him to please send them on a cross-country vacation. (Busy at his drawing board, Fisher complies, but sticks them in a car too small for them.) Now there’s a postmodern sequence as far back as 1924!
I do not understand what McDonnell, or Spiegelman, for that matter, see in Ernie Bushmiller’s brain-dead Nancy. But I was quite surprised to see a magnificent double-page spread from Jack Kirby’s The Eternals, in which the superhuman Eternals Ajak and Ikaris and the human archeologist Doctor Damian gaze in awe at the immense alien Celestial, Arishem the Judge. In its artistic splendor and even majesty, this spread puts to shame Marvel’s recent The Eternal miniseries, which cluelessly sought to reinvent Kirby’s concepts without comprehending them.
A TALE OF TWO SCROOGES
Gemstone Publishing this year released their first Walt Disney’s Christmas Parade special, a collection of old and new Christmas comics stories under a title familiar to me from Christmas “giant” comics of my childhood. I am certainly glad I checked the cover credit: it is a picture of Donald Duck as Santa, with nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie, drawn by Walt Kelly, reminding me that before Pogo he worked as a Disney animator.
The lead story is, of course, written and drawn by the greatest of all Disney comics creators, Carl Barks: “Letter from Santa,” a Donald Duck story from the original Walt Disney’s Christmas Parade #1 in 1949. This is not on a par with Barks’s greatest Christmas story, “A Christmas for Shacktown” (where I may end up moving if the job search proves no more successful in 2004), which is genuinely moving. “Letter from Santa” is instead a holiday-themed farce, full of clever touches.
One such touch is the nature of Donald’s dilemma. How can Barks do a story about a parental figure’s adult concern about finding the present his kids want, when his audience is children who believe that Santa brings the gifts? Barks solves the problem by redefining the parent’s Christmas duty: Donald has screwed up by forgetting to mail his nephews’ letter to Santa.
Before doing Donald Duck comics, Barks worked on stories for the Donald Duck animated cartoons. The shorts featuring Donald and his nephews tend to involve Oedipal wars between the father figure (Donald) and his surrogate sons (Huey, Dewey and Louie); their stated relationship as uncle and nephews helps mask the underlying Freudian subtext. Barks clearly realized that this would not work in the comics format, without the screen’s ability to create constant, frenetic action or a sound track with voice actor Clarence Nash’s angry quacking; moreover, in monthly comics the formula would get tired fast. And in the comics medium Donald and his nephews are actually articulate; without having to decipher Nash’s quacks, it’s easy to tell what they’re saying!
Donald does have brief explosions of temper in this story. But here, as so often in his other Donald stories, Barks presents Donald as the beleaguered American Everyman, in this case going to extreme and absurd lengths to get out of his Christmas predicament. Donald reads in his nephews’ letter to Santa that they want a steam shovel; it never occurs to him that they are talking about a toy.
Nor does Uncle Scrooge realize this when Donald asks him for help.
Barks’ most famous creation, Scrooge McDuck, is obviously based on Ebeneezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Indeed, Scrooge McDuck debuted in another Barks’ Christmas story, “Christmas on Bear Mountain,” from 1947, two years before. “Letter from Santa” finds Scrooge in a transitional state. He is no longer the sinister presence he was in the first story, and he wears glasses with handles, rather than the familiar pince-nez. His office has huge mounds of coins, a prelude to the money bin to come.
The most eye-opening difference between this 1949 Scrooge and the familiar 1950s-1960s version, or even from Dickens’ original, is that he is not a miser! He starts out that way when Donald first asks him for help in this story, but soon proves quite willing to give Donald “a wad of money” to buy a steam shovel. Then, deciding he wants credit for giving the kids their present himself, Scrooge even buys a factory to get his own steam shovel.
In this story Scrooge has as hot a temper as Donald’s. It is as if Barks decided that Donald needed his own “uncle”/father figure for Oedipal conflicts. They spend a page in a slapstick fight, battering each other with bags of coins. The competition escalates in scale to the point that they pit their steam shovels against each other in an absurd but powerful visual spectacle that seems the equivalent of Barks channeling Kirby.
This leads to that classic staple of farce, disguise, with Donald and Scrooge each masquerading as Santa Claus in order to fool the kids (who, in cartoon tradition, cannot see through even the least convincing of disguises; maybe Clark Kent falls into this same tradition). Ultimately Barks resolves the situation by bringing in the real Santa, a voice of sanity, who understands that what the kids really want is the miniature toy steam shovel he brings them. In keeping with the miniaturization theme, Barks finishes with another inspired flourish, demonstrating that Santa shrinks himself in order to go up and down Donald’s chimney. Santa fills the role of deus ex machina: his presence, his generosity to the children, and the final tableau of him riding off in his reindeer-driven sleigh infuse a sense of Christmas spirit into what had been a distinctly un-Christmas-like farcical battle between two egocentric adults.
Created by Barks for the comics, Uncle Scrooge McDuck first appeared on screen in a 1960s instructional featurette called Scrooge McDuck and Money, which I have never seen, and in which he was voiced by Bill Thompson, who, among his other cartoon voices, did the Scottish accent for Jock in Lady and the Tramp. Then in 1983 the Disney studio released its own animated version of Dickens’ story, Mickey’s Christmas Carol, which was telecast this month as part of a special marking Mickey’s 75th (!) anniversary. Despite the title, the main character is. of course, Scrooge McDuck. Other familiar Disney characters play the other roles: for example, Mickey becomes Bob Cratchit, and, is indeed, never addressed as Mickey. Donald naturally turns up as Scrooge’s nephew.
On the old videocassette release of Mickey’s Christmas Carol, actor Alan Young, himself born in Scotland, explains that the film was based on a Christmas Carol record that he cowrote, on which he voiced Scrooge McDuck. Young later learned from a friend that Disney animation was auditioning people to voice Scrooge in a film based on Young’s own record! (It seems it would not occur to the corporate mind to even tell Young about this spinoff of his own project, much less invite him to participate in it.) Young asked to audition, got the part, and went on to play Scrooge in the later Duck Tales television series inspired by Carl Barks’s work.
Young is good in the part, especially the early scenes in which Scrooge gets to be nastily greedy. But this Christmas Carol only skates over the surface of the emotions it should be raising to the surface. One problem is the tactic of casting other familiar Disney characters in the Dickens roles. None of the Disney characters strays far from his established personality. It works for Scrooge McDuck, Donald, and Mickey: seeing Mickey in what is for him the unusual role of mourning the death of a loved one (Tiny Tim) conveys surprising pathos. It is a pleasure to see so many characters from Disney’s animated adaptation of Wind in the Willows turn up in appropriate roles (e. g., Mr. Toad as Fezziwig). But Goofy as Marley’s Ghost, though certainly funny, severely undercuts the seriousness of the role’s function in the story. There’s fun to be had in seeing Willie the Giant, from Mickey and the Beanstalk, as the Ghost of Christmas Present, but his dopiness hardly suits the gravity of Scrooge’s mentor about the hardships of his contemporaries.
Moreover, perhaps in part because the film is so brief (only a half hour), it seems to shy away from most deep emotion: in the Christmas Past sequence, for example, there is no sense of the loneliness of Dickens’ Scrooge as a boy. Mickey’s Christmas Carol feels to me like a Disneyland ride through Dickens’ story: it looks handsome, it’s fun seeing so many Disney characters back on screen enacting parts in this pageant, but I feel as if I am surveying the highlights of Dickens; story without feeling the drama they are intended to conjure.
Now itself twenty years old, Mickey’s Christmas Carol was the first new theatrical film featuring Mickey in thirty years. It has further historical importance in that it was the last film in which Donald Duck was played by Clarence Nash, who created the character’s voice. When Donald wishes Scrooge a parting “Merry Christmas,” it seems a nice way for Nash to bid farewell, too.
I think Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol (1962) may have been my earliest experience of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in any form. I know that since the Magoo version deletes Scrooge’s nephew and sister, I have since had the nagging feeling when reading or seeing other versions of the story that these characters are secondary to the others, simply because they weren’t there when the tale made its initial impression on me as a child.
In fact, watching the Magoo Carol on Cartoon Network recently, I noticed that Scrooge’s sister does make an appearance of sorts: the boy Scrooge has written “sister” on a blackboard. How long it has been since I last watched the Magoo Carol I do not know. Is it possible that I’d never seen it in color before this year? I was surprised to discover that the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come’s robes are not black, but blood red; like its literally skeletal hands, this may actually be an improvement on the depiction in the book.
In the Magoo Carol, there are only two familiar UPA Studios characters playing Dickens’ roles (not that there were many recurring characters at UPA), and most viewers probably will not spot the fact that UPA’s Gerald McBoing-Boing, a now mostly forgotten character, is “cast” as Tiny Tim. In his own cartoons, Gerald “spoke” in sound effects; in Carol, however, he speaks normally. This is because the makers of the Magoo Carol took their task of adapting Dickens very seriously. (I was surprised to see in the Cartoon Network telecast that the Magoo Carol was directed by Abe Levitow, who had served as a co-director on Chuck Jones cartoons at Warners and MGM. But this makes sense, since Jones is so strong at characterization, and the Magoo Carol takes pains to dramatize Dickens’ characters right.)
Presumably all but the smallest children who watch Mickey’s Christmas Carol will understand that Mickey is “playing” Bob Cratchit. Nonetheless, Goofy acts more like Goofy than like Marley. The Magoo Carol, though, comes up with a strategy for putting a greater difference between the usual world of Mr. Magoo and the world of Charles Dickens.
Magoo’s Christmas Carol is actually a play within a play; there is a framing sequence which establishes that Quincy Magoo is an actor who is playing Scrooge in a Broadway musical. Now why is this? I suppose it is because Magoo is a preexisting character, familiar for his misadventures in cartoon shorts, blundering nearsightedly into disasters.
Indeed, in the framing sequence Magoo is his familiar self, crashing his car, triggering chaos through his near-blindness but remaining oblivious to it all. The filmmakers surely wanted to make use of Magoo’s popularity and appeal with the audience in Carol, but also wanted to differentiate Magoo’s behavior from Scrooge’s. So they introduced the idea of Magoo, a cartoon character, acting a role. And, indeed, once the “play” begins, Magoo-as-Scrooge is very different from the Magoo of the framing sequence. Certainly, the Magoo of the original animated shorts was a bad-tempered old man, and that fits the Scrooge character. But the large scale slapstick associated with Magoo vanishes once the play begins.
Interestingly, there are still quiet jokes made in the play that Scrooge is nearsighted, but they are subtle and fit the character (Scrooge is accused of being too cheap to buy spectacles.) Once the play is over, Magoo reverts to his usual self, inadvertently causing a massive collapse of scenery as he takes his solo bows. But though barely able to find the stage in the framing sequence, Magoo has no problem navigating during the play itself. (I am reminded of a quote from Sarah Michelle Gellar in which she claimed she was a klutz offstage but somehow moved much more adeptly when actually playing the athletic Buffy.)
The new Duck Dodgers television series uses a similar tactic: the opening credits inform us that Daffy Duck is playing Duck Dodgers, but within the episodes proper, there is no sign that Dodgers is merely a part in a fiction, and not “reality.” On the other hand, Daffy and Dodgers basically act and think alike, whereas the framing device in the Magoo Carol differentiates between the normal Magoo and Scrooge.
Carol‘s frame also links it to a long tradition of film musicals and alludes to the different cultural status that the Broadway theater had forty years ago. Movie musicals from 42nd Street in the 1930s through The Bandwagon in the 1950s were often about the making of a Broadway musical. Many of the musical numbers therefore became part of the “play” within the movie. In part, I think, this was to justify the artificiality of the theatrical device of having people suddenly shift from speaking to singing and dancing within the more realistic medium of film. But also, I think it indicates the stature that Broadway musicals, and the stage itself, had in the minds of audiences of that time. However massively popular Hollywood movies were in the studio system’s Golden Age, they were not taken seriously as works of art; the auteurist revolution in film criticism did not take hold here until the 1960s. The theatre was considered to be more serious and of greater cultural value than the cinema. Moreover, before the rise of rock and roll, Broadway musicals were one of the principal sources of popular music.
So the makers of the Magoo Carol were actually making a bid for greater respectability by having their character “play” Dickens’ Scrooge, and do it in a format that resembled a Broadway show. Moreover, though in the early 1960s the Golden Age of the Broadway musical was approaching its end, it was still going strong. Not until I saw the Magoo Carol this year did I realize that its vivid and memorable songs were the work of lyricist Bob Merrill and composer Jule Styne, two of the leading names in the history of the Broadway musical. (Not many years before, Styne had composed the music for Gypsy, generally considered one of the greatest Broadway musicals ever.)
The Magoo Carol‘s score contributes greatly to its success. The only number that does not work for me is the pallid ballad given to Scrooge’s lost love, though it works much better sung during the closing credits. In good Broadway fashion, some songs express different emotions in different contexts: Magoo’s “Ringle, Ringle” is initially an ode to greed, and later, after his reformation, a cheerful jingle of generosity. The Cratchit family’s Christmas song starts out alternating mournfulness with a brave effort to celebrate despite causes for despair; it then returns as a joyous finale. “We’re Despicable,” in which the undertaker and his cohorts, who should seem thoroughly repellent for scavenging the dead Scrooge’s possessions, is instead goofily entertaining. On further reflection I realized it fits into a comedic tradition of mocking the banality of evil by portraying its perpetrators as clowns who celebrate their own moral rottenness: see Mel Brooks’ The Producers or David Letterman’s running gags about Osama and Saddam. The most touching part of the score is Magoo/Scrooge’s duet with himself as a boy, mourning his childhood loneliness; later, the old Scrooge reprises the number, this time singing not with his younger self but to his dead future self, in a graveyard. The Disney Carol never comes close to moments like these in handling Scrooge.
The UPA studio was known for rebelling against the Disney studio’s tendency towards literal representations of reality in animated film. The simplified UPA graphic style in the Magoo Carol cannot convey the mood and atmosphere that the settings in the Mickey Carol can, except for Magoo’s graveyard scene, which is dark and expressionistic. Nor are the characters realistically drawn: Bob Cratchit looks oddly like George Jetson with spectacles and sideburns. And yet the characters work dramatically. For example, the Magoo version of Marley’s Ghost is grotesquely caricatured, but the writing, the direction and animation, and the voice acting all combine to convey the character’s purpose in the story. (Indeed, Marley’s Ghost comes over so eerily that as a child I always found it odd that in the concluding framing sequence, he is shown taking curtain calls with the rest of the cast!)
Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol worked for me as a childhood introduction to Dickens’ Christmas Carol, and from my adult vantage point, I’d recommend it for today’s children, as well. In fact, after the Cartoon Network showing, I found myself regretting that no one had gotten Styne and Merrill, when they were still alive, to expand their score for a stage version of Christmas Carol (this time without Magoo).
HOLIDAY HEROICS
In mid-December Cartoon Network ran two Christmas super hero shows written by Paul Dini, who not only has a long association with Warner Animation’s superhero series, but also with Christmas-themed stories in his Jingle Belle comic books.
The first was a new episode of Justice League entitled “Comfort and Joy,” intercutting among three story lines of differing quality. In one, the Flash hunts down the last remaining copy of a toy that the kids in an orphanage want for Christmas. Since this is the post-South Park era in animation, we are supposed to be amused that the toy makes what the Flash aptly describes as fart sounds. Worse, the Flash ends up being aided by the villainous Ultra-Humanite in his white gorilla incarnation, depicted as a supercilious snob who nonetheless not only repairs the toy for the orphans but goes willingly off to jail. Having recently read John Byrne’s portrayal of the Ultra-Humanite as a satanically evil being in Generations 2, a characterization much more faithful to Jerry Siegel’s original, I reflected once again on the pointlessness of using a longrunning character without paying heed to his personality.
Speaking of which, then there’s the Justice League animated series’ version of Hawkgirl, who is now romantically involved with Green Lantern John Stewart. In the Golden Age and Silver Age, Hawkman and Hawkgirl were both a romantic couple and partners in action; indeed, what made Gardner Fox’s Hawkman and Hawkgirl in the 1960s unique among DC superheroes were that they were husband and wife superheroes who worked together as equals. So it’s disconcerting that Hawkman is absent from the Justice League series. Moreover, Fox’s Hawks were sharply intelligent heroes, who were archaeologists at a museum in their unmasked identities, and who drew on a range of ancient weaponry and futuristic technology. The TV Hawkgirl is instead this hot-tempered chick who literally flies into a fury and hits things with a mace. (Mind you, I haven’t recognized the Hawks’ personalities in the comics for years, either, except in books Alex Ross does.) And so, in this Christmas episode, she drags Stewart off to a dive on some other planet and gets them into a brawl. What this has to do with Christmas I have no idea. New Year’s Eve, maybe?
This leaves story line number three, and this is a very good idea: Clark Kent brings the Martian Manhunter with him to his foster parents’ home as a guest, and there, in Smallville, presented as a Norman Rockwell version of small town America, J’onn J’onzz learns the meaning of Christmas. It wasn’t moving, but it was sweet, and, yes, I like the fact that the Kents’ cat is clearly a homage to Streaky the Super-Cat from the early 1960s Superman comics.
The second show was “Holiday Knights,” an animated Batman episode from 1997, based on a DC comic that Dini had written. There has indeed been a tradition of Batman Christmas stories; considering the character’s somber demeanor, perhaps this is surprising, but then Christmas stories provide a welcome break in the gloom that usually overhangs Gotham City.
This also broke down into three separate stories, in this case one following the other, each one better than its predecessor. In the first and least, which Poison Ivy takes control of Bruce Wayne’s mind with a kiss and forces him to take her and Harley Quinn on a shopping spree. Bruce fumes silently while Harley and Ivy run up his credit card and pose in different outfits, intended to look sexier than they actually are, and it reminds me of those Flintstones episodes in which Wilma and Betty would shout “Charge it!” as a fanfare sounded and charge off to spend their husbands’ salary. This was more silly than funny, made Batman look stupid, and even seemed male chauvinistic. And shopping alone does not a Christmas theme make. (See Walt Kelly’s quote about bucks and reindeer.)
The second story found genuine comedy in having the slovenly, bad-tempered police detective Harvey Bullock posing as Santa Claus, and clever in having the shapeshiftying Clayface disguise himself by splitting into four to pose as a group of small children.
The third tale was actually set on New Year’s Eve and featured the reliably entertaining vocal performance by Mark Hamill as the Joker. The good holiday touch here is that the story establishes that Batman and Commissioner Gordon have a tradition of meeting annually at a certain coffee shop on New Year’s Day. There’s a similar device in Sandman, in which Morpheus and his immortal friend Hob likewise meet, which Neil Gaiman has played for an affecting look at friendship. But in “Holiday Knights” the opportunity is missed: Batman seems to be there for mere seconds before he takes off again, and before there could be a scene that actually explored his and Gordon’s longstanding loyalty and friendship for one another. Had there been such a scene, it might have been particularly bittersweet in retrospect, considering that DC has dumped Gordon from the comics. (Will comics companies never learn not to dispose of characters who are so closely associated with a series? Gordon has a major role in the next Batman live action movie, and yet he’s gone from the regular comics.)
Cartoon Network unveiled a brand new hour-long Powerpuff Girls Christmas episode, “‘Twas the Fight before Christmas,” in which the girls’ rival, Princess Morbucks, deceives Santa into thinking that every child on Earth deserves coal in his or her stocking this year except herself. There’s a very well staged sequence in which the Powerpuff Girls pursue Princess, who is endowed with super-powers, through the wintry wilderness of Canada at super-speed in a race to the North Pole. I also very much liked the show’s irreverent take on Santa, who here resembles Bill Sienkiewicz’s depiction of the Kingpin, but with white hair and a beard. This immense Santa is still ultimately a benevolent figure, but demonstrates that he has a side that is pure Christmas god of wrath, as Princess learns in her comeuppance.
CHRISTMAS CARTOON CLASSICS
ABC created a furor with the first of its two December telecasts of the original Peanuts Christmas special, A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965). In yet another example of the corporate mind at work, ABC saw fit to intersperse shots of bachelor party strippers in plugs for the then-forthcoming Trista and Ryan’s Wedding special into this family holiday classic. I caught ABC’s second telecast, by which time heads presumably had rolled and ABC had cleaned up its act.
There was also a brand new Christmas Peanuts special, I Want a Dog, Charlie Brown! and A Charlie Brown Christmas was followed by newer segments under the heading of Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tales. (When A Charlie Brown Christmas debuted in 1965, there were fewer commercials per half hour than there are nowadays. To run the show uncut, they need the new Christmas Tales to fill out an hour-long package.)
The New York Times television reviewer complained that I Want a Dog was too clearly constructed out of old Peanuts: daily strips, creating an unvarying rhythm of gags paced as if to be divided into four-panel sequences. I noticed the rhythm, too, but it did not bother me particularly. Producers Bill Melendez and Lee Mendelsohn collaborated for decades with Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz on the Peanuts animated specials. Since Schulz’s death several years ago, Melendez and Mendelsohn have reportedly stated that they will base further Peanuts specials on Schulz’s past work rather than bring in new writers. I expect it would indeed be difficult to find other writers who could duplicate Schulz’s particular kind of gentle whimsy. I find myself recognizing and remembering with pleasure various bits in these new Christmas cartoons; Schulz’s voice and vision are continuing to come through.
But yet the new Christmas material is disappointing. As the new special’s title, I Want a Dog, Charlie Brown!, suggests, it has more to do with a hunger for a gift; as A Charlie Brown Christmas and the Grinch special point out, there’s more to Christmas than that. I Want a Dog seems to be more about devoting a special to two of Schulz’s later creations, Lucy and Linus’s younger brother Rerun (you see, he’s a “rerun” of Linus as a toddler) and Snoopy’s brother from out West, Spike (named after the actual dog Schulz owned as a boy). The Christmas Tales, centering on different major characters from the strip, hew more closely to Christmas themes. But all of this newer material does not delve beneath the surface tone of the aforementioned genial whimsy. Perhaps that is because Schulz’s strip grew mellower in its later decades.
A Charlie Brown Christmas, which deserves its reputation as a classic, though, originated in the strip’s groundbreaking years, was written by Schulz, and has genuine emotional depth. Schulz created a fictional world in which children speak and think like adults; it is a world of magic realism in which a dog can think and act like a human being, and in which a boy can make a toy piano sound like a grand piano playing Beethoven. But Schulz’s most meaningful innovation was to combine within his characters the emotions of childhood, which they express in an adult manner, and the anxieties of adulthood, which they voice with a child’s openness.
A Charlie Brown Christmas begins with an opening song that is at once quietly celebratory of the holiday season, as the characters skate over a frozen pond, especially when Snoopy shows up and makes his spectacular moves, and at the same time wistfully melancholy. Early on Charlie Brown reveals that he feels “depressed” even though, he says, he knows he should be happy at this time of year; of course, he consults Lucy in her psychiatrist’s office, which resembles a child’s lemonade stand.
Watching the special this year I was surprised: Charlie Brown is confessing to suffering from what we now call “holiday depression,” long before this condition was regularly discussed in the press.
Charlie Brown became an iconic figure because he is the postwar Everyman as Everyboy, afflicted by insecurity and self-doubt, scorned by the people around him, nearly always unhappy. Through him Schulz subverted the image of happy innocent childhood by portraying the real anxieties of both children and adults. (By the way, the observant Peanuts reader notices that Charlie Brown is almost never called simply “Charlie” and I am following Schulz’s example.)
As if he were in a Chekhov play, Charlie Brown tries to overcome his melancholy through work: Lucy arranges for him to direct the school Christmas play. But here, as in his Sisyphean struggles as head of the kids’ baseball team, Charlie Brown suffers the fate of the person who tries to achieve something, tries to exert authority, and tries simply to be recognized as having something worthwhile to contribute, only to be ignored by the people he has to deal with.
Assigned to find a Christmas tree for the play, Charlie Brown becomes fond of a tiny, nearly barren tree whose remaining leaves are falling off. To my mind, Charlie Brown sees the tree as a reflection of himself, not the best of its kind, rather pathetic, but worth respecting and caring for. During the special Charlie Brown has also been dismayed at the commerciality of Christmas, and by picking this less than glamorous tree, casts his vote against materialistic concerns.
He brings it back to the other kids, who laugh at the tree and then laugh at him, reinforcing the idea that the tree represents Charlie Brown himself. The girls, Lucy, Violet and Patty (not to be confused with the later character, Peppermint Patty), take the lead in laughing at Charlie Brown (as does Snoopy, who is not quite man’s best friend). For the first time I realized that these three girls, the original female characters in the strip, resemble both visually and behaviorally, the nagging women in the cartoons drawn by the New Yorker humorist James Thurber.
In despair, Charlie Brown asks what Christmas is really about, and Linus, the most intellectual and spiritually minded of the characters, answers him by reciting a passage from the Bible about the birth of Christ. This shakes the other characters out of their insensitivity. They remove the glittering decorations from Snoopy’s doghouse (earlier condemned by Charlie Brown as an example of Christmas glitz) and hang them on the little tree. Oddly, now the tree is drawn with a full set of leaves, as if it had been restored to health, even symbolically resurrected. The kids greet the returning Charlie Brown by wishing him merry Christmas; delighted by the sight of the restored tree and his warm acceptance by the others, Charlie Brown is for once happy. The show concludes as all the characters, a united community, join in singing a religious Christmas carol.
Most Christmas specials on television deal with the secular side of Christmas, presumably so as not to exclude non-Christians and the non-religious. Schulz was a very religious man, and the fact that A Charlie Brown Christmas concludes with an open expression of Christian beliefs is true to his artistic vision. I wonder how the end of this special works for viewers who are not believing Christians. I suspect that they nonetheless respond positively to the show’s concluding image of Christmas as a time of celebrating community, good will, and ideals that rise above everyday materialism.
This is also the message of another great animated Christmas special, Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966), directed by the recently deceased animation great Chuck Jones, with Dr. Seuss’s own active participation in the project. (For example, I hadn’t realized before studying the credits this time, that Dr,. Seuss wrote the lyrics for the songs. This special, like Magoo’s Carol, is also blessed with an enduring and memorable score.)
Theodore Geisel, a. k. a. Dr. Seuss, and Jones had worked together as far back as on the Private Snafu cartoons that Warners produced for the military during World War II. Thinking about these two giants of cartoon art inspires some melancholy reflections about more recent times.
The reputation of this story has been sullied by the ghastly live action movie version perpetrated several years ago by producer Brian Glazer, director Ron Howard, lead actor Jim Carrey, and, startlingly, Geisel’s widow. I was surprised when I saw Howard and Glazer’s subsequent movie. A Beautiful Mind, that it was done so well; their Grinch was so overblown, unfunny and misconceived that I would have felt justified in assuming they had lost all their artistic talent permanently. During his lifetime, Geisel was extremely cautious about licensing out the rights to his work, obviously concerned about its artistic integrity. After his demise, his wife, apparently not sharing his concern, made the deals with the devil, and the atrocious Grinch movie, and Glazer’s reportedly equally dreadful Cat in the Hat movie (I have no intention of paying to see that) are the results. Now there’s a grim lesson for creative artists: you cannot necessarily even trust your immediate heirs to protect your work.
In 2001 the Film Society of Lincoln Center held a retrospective of Chuck Jones’s work, and the most recent example included was 1965’s The Grinch. So, perhaps, Grinch was Jones’s last masterwork. That is sad and ironic, actually. When Jones was directing his great Warner Brothers cartoons in the 1940s into the early 1960s, he received no recognition outside the animation community, and film critics, not to mention parents, dismissed the Warners cartoons as junk. Jones then spent the last three decades of his life being honored and acclaimed for his past achievements, while sometimes turning out new animated cartoons that did not begin to live up to the classics of his youth and middle age.
Dr. Seuss’s Grinch story is really a variation on the same archetypal tale of redemption that underlies Dickens’s Christmas Carol. But while Dickens gives Scrooge a backstory that shows how he became such a hard-hearted old man, Dr. Seuss provides no such explanation for the Grinch’s nastiness. The narrator suggests a few unpersuasive theories (perhaps his shoes are too tight) but settles on the idea that the Grinch’s heart is simply “two sizes too small.” This is like the famed “motiveless malignity” of Shakespeare’s Iago: various possible motivations are advanced in Othello for Iago’s hatred of the title character, but ultimately, what it comes down to is that Iago is just plain evil. The Grinch is not one of the happy Whos of Whoville. He is, in effect, an alien creature who does not share their background and does not even comprehend what Christmas really is. (He’s in the same situation as his fellow green alien, J’onn J’onzz, in the Justice League Christmas episode, though J’onn lacks the Grinch’s malevolence.) The live action movie, of course, misses the point and recasts the Grinch as something of a mutant Who, the victim of prejudice, who was a misfit in Who society and sought revenge by destroying their Christmas.
The Grinch, of course, disguises himself as Santa Claus and his dog Max as a reindeer in order to act as the anti-Santa, going down chimneys to steal presents. But even before donning the costume, the Grinch was like Santa’s evil counterpart: both of them live in a snowy wasteland, separated from the community that they visit on Christmas.
Why is it that the animated Grinch succeeds so well where the live action Grinch, however commercially successful, artistically failed so miserably? In large part it is a matter of finding the proper focus.
There are elements of the Grinch’s tale that have an epic scope: he lives in the towering mountains, and the Whos comprise an entire community. But, in both the book and the animated special, the story primarily has a very intimate scale: there are only three major characters, the Grinch, his dog (whose role is much expanded for the animated version), and Cindy Lou Who, who basically has no more than a cameo part. Except for the memorable songs and for voice artist June Foray’s few lines as Cindy Lou, there is only one voice to be heard throughout the special, that of Boris Karloff.
Another of the movie’s gross mistakes was casting Jim Carrey in the title role. The Grinch conforms to the same archetype as Ebeneezer Scrooge. One should no more cast Carrey as the Grinch than cast Jerry Lewis as Scrooge. Memorable Scrooges tend to be dramatic actors – Patrick Stewart, George C. Scott – who can credibly convey the character’s grimness but also play comedy.
Karloff was brilliant casting for Grinch because, drawing on our knowledge of his great horror roles, he could convincingly project genuine evil in voicing the Grinch, but also convey a grandfatherly friendliness in reading the narration. The fact that Karloff plays both the Grinch and the narrator increases the intimate feel of the show: it is one voice, sometimes malevolent, sometimes benevolent, that carries the audience through the entire story. When the Grinch reforms, Karloff no longer needs use the gruffer tone of his voice, and the grandfatherly tone takes over in full.
It’s interesting to see how the Jones and Seuss visual styles merge in the characters in this animated special: the background characters look more Seussian, and the main characters, presumably because they “act” more, remain blends of Seuss and Jones but lean towards the latter. There’s something of Wile E. Coyote in the look of Jones’s Grinch (the Arctic wilderness is a colder analogue to the Coyote’s desert; like the Coyote the Grinch is obsessed with a goal he will fail to achieve), and something of Daffy at his most misanthropic in his personality (like Daffy he cannot abide others being happy when he is not).
The great triumph of the animated Grinch is Jones’s brilliance at conveying personality through facial expressions, poses and movement, somehow treating the broadness of cartoons with subtlety and taste. Such is Jones’s mastery that he even creates a baroquely elaborate evil smile for the Grinch at one point (If you’ve seen it, you know which moment I mean.) and it comes off as amusingly artistic rather than excessive.
Only at one moment towards the end (when the Grinch’s face glows with redemption) did I feel Jones had dipped into sentimentality. Otherwise he keeps a firm hand on the steering wheel throughout, making the Grinch’s character arc both entertaining and emotionally credible. The happy ending is warm without being saccharine, and when Karloff’s voice moves seamlessly from the narrating the final scene to speaking Seuss’s concluding verses hailing Christmas, the fable becomes transcendent.
Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol ends with hand-clapping merriment. A Charlie Brown Christmas finishes in peace and quiet contentment. But of all the Christmas cartoon stories I’ve covered in this column, for me only The Grinch achieves a genuinely heartwarming conclusion that truly evokes the spirit of Christmas.
-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson
