Movie Review: Arthur Christmas

Hi!  I have three other post ideas that I started drafting for today, but then I had to stop (for various reasons), and because I'm a procrastinator, I didn't get back to posting until now.  And what, do you ask, was I doing with all that time in between?

I was watching "Arthur Christmas."

Other posts scrapped.  I'm doing a movie review.

"Arthur Christmas" is a British/American movie about this gawky kid, Arthur Clause, who's over-excitable and under-appreciated, with silly reindeer slippers to match his ridiculous Christmas sweaters.  Arthur just-so-happens to be the son of I think Santa the Twentieth, and his older brother, Steve is in line to be Santa the Twenty-First.  There'a also Grandsanta (Santa the Nineteenth) and Mrs. Santa (Santa the Twentieth's wife and Arthur and Steve's mom).  And there's an overabundance of fabulously short-haired elves.  All the characters have unique personalities and not one of them comes across as flat.  It's fabulous.

Arthur and Grandsanta watching Santa's run on their apparently Santa-special TV.
(image courtesy of: IMDb)

But so anyway, it's Christmas eve, and among all the amazing new technology of twenty-first-century Santa, something crazy happens, and one of the elves messes up and loses a present.  No one realizes that a child has been missed until hours after Santa comes back from his run.  No one really seems to care, but Arthur and Grandsanta (and a stowaway elf named Bryony) run off in the old-fashioned sleigh so they can drop off the present before sunrise.

Bryony is a masterfully dedicated elf from the gift-wrapping division.
(image courtesy of: SOSMoviers.com)

This movie is fabulous and exciting, flying at high speeds through cities and fighting off lions, but the storyline is not the only wonderful thing.  If you couldn't tell already, the main character, Arthur, is just absolutely adorable, and has a stupid laugh, and also a lot of silly phobias.  I love him on about just the same level that I love Jack Frost, which is impressive.  (But for different character traits, of course.)

This is Steve.  He likes espresso.  His goatee is shaped like a Christmas tree.
(image courtesy of: theepcgallery.com)

But so moving on.  What I was going to say in that last paragraph, before I got sidetracked, is that the most beautiful things about this movie are all the little Christmas story morals that clearly float around in the movie, but aren't actually said.  (You have no idea how much it bothers me when people in stories point out the morals to us unnecessarily.  It makes me want to get all the writers together for a nice game of Brick Roulette.)  But in "Arthur Christmas," you instead find yourself yelling the morals at the screen because you disagree with the other characters (like Steve; he tries hard and means well, but he's very mislead).

"Arthur Christmas" was made in 2011 and is rated PG.  I would recommend it to every lover of the Christmas spirit with 97 minutes on their hands.  It made me very happy.

Joyeux Noël!  (Merry Christmas!)
-Allie