***
Boris Stepantsev's short The Nutcracker is handily the best adaptation we've seen as part of Mixed Nutcrackers, and seems likely to rise as the best adaptation period when all's said and done. It's quite an economical piece of storytelling, incorporating practically all important beats and elements from the Hoffmann story in a quick 25 minutes without losing any charm, and showing off some delightful animation in the process. No need to reconstitute the elements into something wholly of its own kind, nor belabor the point with loud humor, nor wander off in its own direction after the introductory action, just the story of a young girl finding a Nutcracker in the Christmas tree, learning of his story, defending him against the Mouse King, and falling in love. There's a bit of compression for time and effect, like rendering Marie a nameless servant girl with no godfather or younger brother to interfere in her journey, making the Princess Pirlipat and the Nutcracker Prince one and the same, freezing the Nutcracker's whole kingdom, and stripping the Land of Sweets segment of pretty much everything save an elegant dance (set to Waltz of the Flowers rather than the final number, which is instead used to underscore the Nutcracker's despair at his appearance) in order to give the stuff with the mice more focus, but otherwise the whole thing's here, and dances through the plot elegantly.
It's probably also the prettiest looking of the animated adaptations we've seen, with some of my favorite designs for each of the major characters. I'm all about Marie's awkward, lanky appearance with big clogs in the place of the usual slippers and those round, curious eyes, the Nutcracker's rectangular shape and flexible mouth that never stops baring some nice square teeth, the Mouse Queen's three heads sharing a single gigantic crown atop a hunched body clad in deep blues and light purples, and her son's rotund design, which bloats into an imposing ball when he inherits her crown and becomes Mouse King. In fact, similar to the Culkin-starring adaptation, I really like how all the mice share a similar rounded design, and delight in their more prominent screentime so we can look at their silly scurryings longer. The backgrounds, I'm not entirely certain how to describe them... it's like they used watercolors that crystalized into impressionistic sheets of ice, giving the characters wonderfully detailed backdrops to play against whether they're in the appropriately-sized, pink and yellow king's court in flashback, or the barren dark blues and greens of the parlor at shrunken scale. Environments varied as a Christmas tree full of ornaments or a blank stretch of wall are equally pleasing and rewarding to look at and follow details through in this manner. Such detailed backgrounds also helps the characters' cleaner models stand out, and while this occassionally produces an effect whereby they float above the scenery rather than moving through, it also helps Marie and the Prince's final, transformitive dance wherein they shift between themselves and flower-petals as they glide through a reflective night sky of flashing light and color feel all the more magical.
This thing's good, spellbinding and embodying the childlike innocent wonder I found in the novella better than most. It doesn't have my absolute favorite Nutcracker design, or Mouse King design, or battle between toys and mice (look to The Motion Picture, the Culkin film, and Fantasy for those respectively), but it gets the overall feel right and gratifies the viewer in a spritely timelimit. Very nice to find something I can wholeheartedly appreciate without a sliver of irony or major critique in this marathon - a good last-minute Christmas present to the lot of us!
4/5
***
God, but do Tom and Jerry deserve better caretakers. Y'all saw the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory memes last year, right? The ones with all the awkward faces you think are smear frames but actually remain in unmoving focus for several seconds, the bizarre attempts to shoehorn Tom and Jerry into a pointless retelling of the 1971 movie, the endless reposting of that one Wonka smirk towards the end? Bizarre and bad as it's said to be, I'd easily take such an approach to shoving the cat and mouse pair into The Nutcracker than whatever the hell is going down in A Nutcracker Tale. Hoffmann's story is legit perfect for a seven-minute short in the style of those from the 40s and 50s - Tom and Jerry doing their usual antics, the whole part with the mouse army showing up and doing battle with the toy army happens, Jerry gets caught up in the press, Tom gets exploited as a prop weapon by the toys, we do a little runaround, we chomp the Nutcracker's teeth down on someone's tail, we play a few lines of Tchaikovsky, we go home. If the ballet had its revival just a few years earlier, when Fred Quimby was still pumping out cartoons under the original Hanna-Barbera team and vying for Best Animated Short Oscars, I could see all the classic gags slotting handily into such a set-up.
Show of hands, who amongst you would ever guess a Tom and Jerry Nutcracker thing would involve Jerry idly wishing he could dance, being granted not only ballet talent by the voice of God who is also the narrator and also Santa and also emblamized by the Star of Bethlehem (called out as such by a character in the film, no less), but an entire magical kingdom of living toys to rule as Mouse King, which is ruined the second Tom and his alleycat friends wander in, and are granted automatic control of the kingdom by the same magic power, necessitating a quest to find the Toymaker across various thematically-incompatible dimensional planes? And also Tuffy is there.
"Bizarre" is the word for this thing. Beyond dressing everyone in old-fashioned army uniforms, keeping a Tara Strong-voiced tiny ballerina hostage for occasional asides, and quoting Tchaikovsky's music at the most inappropriate times, there's practically nothing here to theme this as a Nutcracker-based work, yet it has no identity of its own besides. The creative team seemingly indulged every idea they had in the process of screenwriting and drawing layouts, clumping in random bits of overwrought drama they resolve inside seconds, trips inside a lair of snakedragons and through a Coney Island-style amusement park, an appearance by a Frankenstein-esque mad doctor cat, and many, many more little bits of incohesive weirdness. It's hardly Nutcracker-themed, calling it Christmas-themed would do it injustice, it rarely does anything with the magical kingdom being confined to a theater, and multiple segments break away from something so simple as generic winter-based setting, so what is this meant to be? I can't even claim it's to sell a soundtrack or take advantage of some tunes in the Warner Music Archive, because The Nutcracker's music is public domain.
One might claim it's meant to be all over the place and jumbled-up nonsense because anarchy was such an integral part of the theatrical cartoon landscape which birthed Tom and Jerry, but I'd argue it's nothing of the kind. For one, it lacks any degree of self-awareness necessary to follow in the steps of something like Duck Amuck, and indeed asks the viewer take the various perils Jerry and company face in their journey completely seriously right before jarring fifty feet right into slapstick again. Speaking of the slapstick for a far more important another, if throwing up our hands and going, "Screw it, we'll just do whatever we like!" is meant to be an OK thing to do because it gives rise to some good gags, it fails at such. The outsourced cheapo Korean animation on display is slow, lifeless, and lacking in anything one might recognize as the wild, weighty energy of a classic Tom and Jerry short. Gags dependent on physical humor are either too afraid to indulge in the old ways of a soddering iron to the noggin or a bowling ball down the gullet and so opt for weak variations on "character go flying and get hurt off-screen haha," or else go so terribly outlandish with a baffling lack of both build-up and suddenness that it doesn't work. They all just sorta... happen, with no speed or purpose, and get easily overwhelmed by bad stand-up routines from talking characters, or the far too thick sentimentality, or an out of nowhere baseball joke.
I could handily rag on the film for ages, having a go at it's odd attempts to set lyrics to Tchaikovsky's music in the early going before dropping the atonal conceit; or make a try at delivering weak praise, saying the ornament character who's constantly coming unraveled might've had an interesting gimmick going if they animated his final disheveled state as anything other than a barely wiggling mass of string. Considering, however, how the film ends on a limp series of gags as Jerry drives the cats from his about-to-vanish-forever kingdom with such a mediocre lack of creativity or fun, I don't think carrying on past this point necessary. This is a flat corporate product - one which draws heavy, groaning sighs on the regular and is probably pretty bad to show your kids if you don't want them taking to YouTube comments sections and droning about how such a grey, inert film is an underrated classic ten years hence, but a flat corporate product all the same, and so deserving of an equally limp, lifeless end to this review.
I paid four bucks for this. When the time comes for the anti-capitalist uprising and we're collectively dismantling all the major entertainment conglomorates, I'm gonna walk into the Warner Bros treasurer's office and ask for those back.
2/5
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