Over the past week, I’ve been scouring Netflix for Christmas movies and
have come up with a few, most of which I’ve never heard of. Last night’s
oddball film was a little 2001 animated flick called Nine Dog Christmas.
The one mark in the movie’s favor going into it was the presence of
James Earl Jones. With him serving as the austere narrator, surely it
couldn’t be too bad...
This hour-long Christmas tale has two
main threads that converge before long. In one, there’s a group of eight
hard-on-their-luck mutts who wind up in the clutches of a nefarious
Frenchman named Pierre (Randy Rice), who travels around in a sleigh
pulled by his long-suffering dog Frenchie. As he carts them off to try
to make a quick buck off of them, the pooches get to know each other.
Australian Snowplow (Rice) and Scottish MacGregor (Thomas Garner) have
authoritative airs that make them the ragtag gang’s de facto leaders.
Among the rest, one is loopy, and two are rapidly falling in love with
each other. Each dog has his or her own personality quirks.
Meanwhile, at the North Pole, Santa (Pat Fraley) has run into a problem,
though he doesn’t realize it. The reindeer are down with the flu, and
the elves scramble to find replacements before the boss finds out.
Neurotic head elf Buzz (Scott Hamilton) is particularly distraught, and
he enlists the aid of cheerful novice Agnes Anne (Russi Taylor) to find a
new team of sled pullers in time. Whose path should they cross but
those dogs in Pierre’s clutches? But getting them to Santa and training
them for their takeover isn’t as easy as they might think.
I
found the animation and voice work in this special to be pretty
enjoyable. We hear a variety of different accents: French, Spanish,
Scottish Australian. Several actors voice multiple characters, but that
is never obvious, as each voice is entirely distinct from the others.
Jones makes a fantastic narrator, just as one would expect, and many of
the actors lace their vocal performances with humor.
The
story, however, is rather weak. Replacing reindeer with dogs doesn’t
seem like such a good idea, and why go so far away to recruit? Couldn’t
the elves simply round up some moose or polar bears? I would think that
anyone living in proximity to the North Pole would be happy to lend
Santa a hand. For that matter, if size is so unimportant, the elves
could probably pull the sleigh themselves. Then again, they might be
just a little bit small for the job. Additionally, the conclusion of the
movie, while rather heartwarming, makes little sense, as it involves
Santa getting dragged back to the North Pole by a tow truck.
Pierre makes a rather entertaining villain who seems modeled after McLeach, the poacher from The Rescuers Down Under,
right down to the disgruntled animal sidekick and our last shot of him
in the movie. I found it hard to keep most of the dogs straight, but
it’s not really all that important; the majority of the pooches are just
filler to get to that magic number that is the same as the reindeer. I
like intrepid Agnes, voiced by one of the regulars on the wonderful
kids‘ show Jakers!, and Buzz has a couple of good moments, but the rest of the elves are inconsequential.
There’s also the matter of the music. The over-the-top love ballad seemed like something out of the cringe-worthy From Justin to Kelly,
and the repeated song about “sticktoitivity” is a strange combination
of rap and power ballad that doesn’t seem to gel at all and annoyed my
mom hugely. Gary Morris, who wrote the songs, has won a Grammy for his
work before, but that background is not evident here.
It
wasn’t a terrible way to spend an hour, but I’ve certainly seen better
Christmas specials. Unless you’re really hard up for something
Christmassy, I’d skip Nine Dog Christmas.
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