THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS (SHORT)

Here's a little fun tradition that my family and I love to do on every Christmas Eve. Before we would all go to bed, my family and I would all sit together by the Christmas tree and each of us would read a part from the famous Christmas poem "Twas The Night Before Christmas". It’s a tradition that we’ve been doing for a long time, and is one of the many activities that I look forward to on Christmas Eve. Since one of the Christmas shorts on the "March Of The Wooden Soldiers" DVD is a live action adaption of the poem I'm going to review it today on Christmas Eve, thus closing all the Christmas shorts that I reviewed on the DVD. So this is my short review of the1946 short film...

THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS




This was another short film that I remember seeing as a kid on another video tape full of Public Domain Christmas shorts. Ironically, it actually came right after Max Fleischer's “Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer” cartoon on the tape that I watched it on. In all honestly I remember it pretty vaguely; I can remember the Sugarplums dancing in the sleeping kids heads, but that’s about it. After finally getting a chance to see it again, how does it hold up? Well, in all honesty, in terms of it being good, it really doesn't hold up. For the very few of you out there who never read the classic poem, the premise is pretty much just about a Father witnessing Santa visiting his house to leave toys for his kids as his Wife and children are asleep. So with such a simple premise that can easily fill an entire less than 10 minute short film, with already an entire script written for the filmmakers to create, how did the people behind the short mess it up?

Well once the opening credits were finished, the first thing I saw was snow on the trees on the brightest Christmas night ever. That's literally the first image of the short film that we see that takes place after the opening credits. I mean it looks pretty, but if this short is supposed to take place at night (Hello, it's in the title) why does the first image of the film look like a bright and pleasant winters day, to suddenly going to a pitch black Christmas night? Things didn't seem to get better when the next image I saw is the house where the family lives that looks like they're snowed in. The moment when I knew the short was in serious trouble is when I got a glimpse of a mouse that’s either a very old cheap toy or is a dead mouse that's been stuffed. Either way, it didn't look cheerful or cute at all. Things get a whole lot freakier when Santa starts to appear who laughs so freaking much that it makes him look creepy and insane, instead of jolly. As for the Father who witnesses' all this, we see him in one scene and that's it, we never see him on-screen again. We don't even see him when the kids rush down the stairs to play with their toys in the middle of the night. I guess the short film is trying to put us in the point of view of the Father, but it does a very poor and unconvincing job at doing so.

While the majority of the short is in live action, there are some animated bits thrown in. The first piece of animation that we get are the Sugarplums dancing in the sleeping kids heads, and though I found it funny and cute at first glance, I started getting bored by the joke quickly since the joke went on long enough to make me realize that the animation for these dancing sweets is on a constant loop. Funny thing about those dancing sweets is they actually remind me a lot of the dancing snacks from those "Let's All Go To The Lobby" advertisements that you'd see for Movie Theaters in the 50s; even though this came out in the mid 40s. The other bit of animation that’s used for the short are the scenes of Santa Claus pulling his reindeer on his sleigh that's about to lift off the ground. As decent as the animation is, I always found that choice to be just as weird as the choice of making Santa animated in the Christmas short "Merry Christmas!" since this short constantly transitions back and fourth to Santa being in live action to Santa being in animation, and in both of these different shots, Santa's sleigh would be on the ground when he’s animated, while a live action Santa looks and acts like he's in the air. It's seriously a mess that doesn't gel together well. I mean the Howdy Doody Christmas short did a better job at blending together the animation and live action footage, than the actual short that the footage originated from, and half of the stock-footage used in the Howdy Doody short was painfully out of place (Which I do give “The March Of The Wooden Soldiers” DVD credit for editing a good chunk of those sequences out).

I have to admit, as clumsy and creepy as this short is I'd be lying if I said that I didn't enjoy it. I'm not saying it's a good Christmas short, but it is entertainingly enjoyable. Some of the Christmas images are nice; the narrator does a nice job at reciting this classic poem (This is actually one of the few versions where you hear some of the original words from the actual poem, like Donner being called Donder for example); and the strange and bad decisions that this short film makes are actually pretty laughable, even if some of it does look a bit creepy. I know I lost it when I saw Santa come down the chimney, where it looks like the actor had a bit of a rough landing. I don't highly recommend it, but if you're looking for some unintentional laughs with some nice Christmas images as you're hearing a classic poem, then give it a watch.

RATING 2/5