That Christmas is a little bit like the Love Actually of animated family movies — multiple cleverly and sometimes unexpectedly intersecting stories, a Christmas pageant, a shy kid hopelessly in love with a girl — all set in a fictional seaside village with picturesque houses and a close-knit town. It very much resembles writer Richard Curtis’s own hometown of Walberswick, as he confided to Roger Durling at a recent SBIFF Cinema Society screening of holiday film, now streaming on Netflix.
Curtis, who did indeed write Love Actually, as well as Notting Hill, Yesterday, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and the three children’s books — That Christmas, The Empty Stocking, and Snow Day — that he wove together to create That Christmas as a film, said that moving away from romance and into family films was a welcome departure.
“So often we spend our creative lives 40 years behind our experience. I was still writing about boy meets girl when I had children, and I really loved that. One of the things I loved most about this film was catching up. I was trying to write something, in fact, a bit late because my kids are now in their 20s, but so much of my experience of the last 20 years is raising children, how they behave, what they think of us, are they lonely, what they think of each other. So I was delighted to be able to do it, and I think it is because it’s hard to really capture a child in a film …. So I think in some ways, if I was ever going to make a kid a movie mainly about children, animation is perfect.”
The style of animation is quite different from the whimsical illustrations by Rebecca Cobb in the book, with an impressive cast that includes Love Actually star Bill Nighy, as well as Brian Cox, Fiona Shaw, and Dr. Who’s Jodie Whittaker, among others. I found it entertaining, with enough charm and humor — there’s a hilarious subplot with turkeys and a school Christmas play they describe as “a strictly vegetarian, multicultural funfest with lots of pop songs and stuff about climate change” — to keep my attention.
If you’re looking for something to watch with the whole family, this could fit the bill.
See trailer here.
