Afonso Cuaron has won two Oscar for Best Director, for Gravity and Roma. His films cover a wide range of genres, and he has directed films that are family-friendly (A Little Princess, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) and films that...aren't (Children of Men, Y Tu Mama Tambien). However, since Roma in 2018, he hasn't directed any new films.
That doesn't mean he hasn't been keeping busy. He directed all seven episodes of the recent buzzy miniseries Disclaimer, with an all-star cast of Oscar winners Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, and Oscar nominees Lesley Manville, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Kodi Smit-McPhee. He's also been producing, though that isn't going nearly as well, as his recent output includes Robert Zemeckis's already-forgotten remake of The Witches and an Apple film called Raymond & Ray, which flew completely under the radar despite starring Ewan McGregor and Ethan Hawke. More surprisingly, he's spent the last three years producing Christmas shorts for Disney+. Two years ago came Le Pupille, an Italian comedy-drama about the Christmastime struggle between a bunch of orphan girls and the orphanage's mother superior during World War II. It got an Oscar nomination for Live Action Short. Last year came The Shepherd, starring John Travolta as a mysterious pilot who helps guide a Royal Air Force flyer in a disabled plane to a safe landing field. This year, we have his first animated offering, An Almost Christmas Story.
Cuaron is not the only acclaimed name behind the scenes. The director is David Lowery, who previously worked for Disney when he made his acclaimed re-imagining of Pete's Dragon. He has also directed A Ghost Story, The Old Man and the Gun, and The Green Knight. There is a lot of talent on this special.
The story revolves around a young owl named Moon who lives with his father and younger brother in a nest in a large forest. Moon routinely ignores his father's warnings about predators--at least until he is attacked in the air one day by a large hawk. Moon survives but injures his wing, and finally listens to his father's instructions when told to take shelter in a hollow tree. Unfortunately, the tree is almost immediately cut down and shipped to New York City--with Moon in tow--to serve as the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree.
Moon ends up encountering a pair of rude, threatening pigeons before finding himself in the presence of Luna, a young girl who, like Moon, has an injured--or in her case, missing--limb and who, like Moon, is lost. Still, the two stick together to get Moon back to the Christmas tree, and maybe, just maybe, back home.
The animation is absolutely gorgeous. While it is CGI, it is made to look like stop-motion, with the characters appearing to be made out of wood or other materials around the house. It is pretty clear that Disney did not skimp on the production. They also didn't skimp on the voice cast, bringing in such ringers as Jim Gaffigan (as Moon's father), Natasha Lyonne (as one of the pigeons), and John C. Reilly, as the omnipresent folk-singing narrator, who even gets a couple of nice original songs to sing. The two main characters are voiced by young actors Cary Christopher, a regular on Days of Our Lives, and Estella Madrigal, who has no other IMDB credits. They are both quite good.
Where the special skimps is in the writing. The "out-of-towner vs. big bad New York" storyline is an old one, seen in everything from The Out-of-Towners to Home Alone 2 to last year's Migration. That one even took the novelty of the naive outsider being a bird first. I also felt the story (written by Lowry and veteran movie and TV scriptwriter Jack Thorne, from a story by Thone and Cuaron) was a bit rushed. By the time Moon and Luna properly met, the special was already halfway over, and their relationship didn't get much time to develop. Indeed, I sort of felt that the story was pushing the "They're just alike!" angle, from their names onward, a bit too hard, probably to compensate for the lack of time to develop their relationship. At 21 minutes, the special is clearly designed to fill a half-hour timeslot on an ad-supported TV channel, but really, this could have benefited from another ten to fifteen minutes.
One other note--Disney submitted this to the MPAA, as the studio has entered it in film festivals in the hopes of getting an Animated Short nomination at the Oscars. It got a PG for "mild peril". The scene with the hawk attack is somewhat scary, and there is some rude humor when a dog reveals to Moon that he had peed all over a subway station, but if this is too spicy to get a G, then the G is well and truly dead.
An Almost Christmas Story is pleasant to watch, and is an agreeable holiday time filler. I did enjoy it. That said, the story is very slight, and doesn't reach what the people involved in the making of this are truly capable of. This is certainly not a bad special, but really could have and should have been even better.
Next time: The weirdest Christmas special/toy commercial this side of The Glo Friends Save Christmas.
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