ROME – A little quietly, but what is perhaps truly the perfect holiday film has arrived on Netflix a few weeks ago. Let’s talk about That Christmasanimator Simon Otto’s directorial debut, which follows a series of intertwining stories about family and friends, love and loneliness, and Santa Claus making a big mistake when it comes to filling a Christmas stocking. But above all of beaches, ice sheets and lots of turkeys to save. Enriched by the voices – in the original – of Bill Nighy, Brian Cox, Fiona Show, Rhys Darby and Jodie Whittaker, the film is the film adaptation of the literary trilogy by Richard Curtis and Rebecca Cobb (That Christmas, The Empty Stocking, Snow Day – alas, unpublished in Italy).
It’s not a case of homonymy, it’s Richard Curtis, the director of Love Actually, I Love Radio Rock e Question of Timewhich with That Christmas he made his debut as a screenwriter in animation, curating on paper and authorial intentions a magnificent adaptation which was originally – in 2022 to be precise – scheduled for cinema with Warner Bros. Pictures before the Los Gatos giant acquired the distribution rights from Locksmith Animation. A choral work that is precisely in the manner of Love Actually – graphically quoted here in the famous moment of Andrew Lincoln’s doorstep declaration to Keira Knightely – sees the community of Wellington-on-Sea don the universal dress of the vital microcosm in telling about parenthood and anxiety, bereavements and first crushes , of loneliness and shyness.
In the background, needless to say, Christmas and its emotional-value charge as a magnifying glass of the human feelings it envelops That Christmas like a hot towel in its harmonious development (even if to tell the truth a bit limping in the third act), giving a hilarious and unprecedented Santa Claus (Brian Cox is majestic in vo!) the role of omniscient narrator to which Curtis and Otto entrusts the breaths and the rhythm of the entire story. And we’re talking about a narrative that starts in medias resrewinds in temporal digression, to then proceed in a linear manner. Last but not least, Ed Sheeran who wrote an unreleased song for the film (Under The Tree) cleverly inserted into one of the sweetest moments of the story. Definitely not to be missed!
