A Boy Called Christmas

A Boy Called Christmas

A Boy Called Christmas is a dazzling Santa Claus origin story with a stellar cast, beautiful visuals and enough sadness to stop it being too sweet.

Dame Maggie Smith is Aunt Ruth, the sour last-minute babysitter for three children who are still grieving for their mother. It’s Christmas Eve but their father Matt (Joel Fry), sad and preoccupied, has decided they will skip the holiday this year. There will be no decorations or presents. After he dashes off to deal with a work emergency, Aunt Ruth starts telling the kids a story about a boy named Nikolas (Henry Lawfull), who lived many years ago with his father Joel (Michiel Huisman) in a remote Finnish mountain cabin; Joel was a woodchopper.

Nikolas is also mourning his late mother killed by a bear; every night he asks his dad to tell him the story she used to tell, about a little girl who got lost in the woods one winter and stumbled upon an elf community who loved and protected her until the spring thaw allowed her to go home “with her pockets full of chocolates.”

Nikolas has one toy a doll made for him by his mom out of a turnip and one friend: Miika, a mouse he names and tries to teach how to talk.

The king (Jim Broadbent) rounds up all his most loyal subjects including Joel for what he calls “a test.” The idea is that each subject must go on some sort of quest in order to bring hope back to the people. Joel signs up with some other folks hoping to find elves just in case it isn’t all folklore.

He, too, puts an auntie in charge; but Aunt Charlotte (look past the terrible false teeth and you’ll recognize Kristen Wiig) isn’t much for soothing bedtime tales. She’s not even much for feeding or allowing inside cabin sleepings of Nikolases. She is selfish and mean. And when Nikolas happens upon a clue about where Elfhelm might be, he and Miika (wittily voiced by Stephen Merchant) set off to find his father and help him do so.

Their search becomes a magical adventure across snowy mountains, with both natural and fantastical challenges. Nikolas befriends a reindeer that he names after Lake Blitzen; he also has a scary encounter with a troll and a less scary one with a winged pixie who can only tell the truth and likes to set off colorful little explosives. This is the origin of Christmas crackers that make a little pop when you pull the tab and then they open up to reveal paper hats and ridiculously silly jokes.

Elfhelm, under the iron rule of Mother Vodal (Sally Hawkins), is in trouble. It’s not as jolly or giving as it used to be because some visitors they welcomed turned out to be bad guys. Nikolas will learn some painful, difficult lessons as we witness the origins of many Christmas customs; but he always responds to challenges with kindness and integrity.

The lushness of Dario Marianelli’s score and Gary Williamson’s production design give A Boy Called Christmas an authentic sense of enchantment.

The film also uses intricate animation to tell Joel’s story when he was going to sleep in Elfhelm and Aunt Ruth with the children as they turn into Nikolas’ adventures. There are a couple of sneaky nods to recognized problems with an organization called The Resistance challenging Mother Vodal’s terrified dictatorship. And then the king asks his subjects what would make them happy; they suggest “health care,” “a living wage,” but he says it’s a “hope” quest even if “most of you will die.”

Lawfull does well bringing warmth and certainty into his dealings with various computer-generated imagery creatures but his chemistry is most on fire with Zoe Margaret Colletti, whose Truth Pixie has got a lot of twinkle. Some parts are sad, including redemptive sacrifice, which keeps within the fairy tale tradition of real stakes so that moments of joy mean something.

Kids will delight in recognizing the beginnings of many Christmas traditions, yet what will really stick with them is kindness, bravery and as Aunt Ruth puts it stories that hold the universe together.

Watch 31 For Free On Gomovies.