Tonight I got a chance to check out a sneak-peek of the upcoming Sony Pictures Animation & Aardman Animation joint venture, "Arthur Christmas." I was only shown the first 30 minutes so this isn't a full review but just some thoughts on what I did see. First... here's a summary of what was in the first 30 minutes:The movie opens with a long trucking establishing shot over a town in Cornwall, England where a little girl is mailing a letter to Santa. That letter is being read over narration-style by the girl which leads to a soft cut to Arthur in his small work room. He finishes reading, giggles at the picture the girl had drawn and begins to write a reply. This whole sequence is quite slow, cute and actually beautiful at parts (see: Cornwall and Arthur's work room sets). But I was sitting next to fellow animator Dave Johnson, and he remarked that if his 4 year old were watching this he'd be fidgeting by now. It's a very slow start.This leads into a scene on MASSIVE overdrive where all the elves are delivering presents in a crazy high-tech, highly militant style and pampering Santa the whole way. I didn't like Santa already. I'm not going to go into too much beyond that because it's a LOT of fast flying camera shots, quick cuts, hard jumps and most of the gags are relative parody's on action movie cliches.The real charm of the movie isn't felt until we get to the dinner table with the family. That whole shot is excellent and I got obsessed with the Grandsanta character and wanted to see more of him. I was very happy to see that the movie's plot involves him and Arthur going on a rogue mission to deliver a toy to a forgotten child the "old school" way. Let me back up a little bit and comment on some of the specifics...

The character designs are... OK. Arthur's relative blandness isn't a surprise since he's the main character and that's a design struggle that often falls on the lead (think: Linguini from Ratatouille, who Arthur looks a lot like). The current santa is not too inventive and the character of Steve (unfortunate to my namesake) is the least interesting of the bunch. It's Grandsanta, again, that steals the show here. He's wonderfully designed and fun to look at. You get a sense of his character the very moment you first see him.

This is something that's a little hard to comment on because it was only the first 30 minutes. All I can really say is that it wasn't spectacular, but had its moments. There are little character choices that bugged me like having Arthur have his mouth half open when he was writing the letter and Mrs. Claus' virtually immobile face, but again... Grandsanta saves the day! What really stands out in his performance is the emotability of his face. After the sneak-peek we were shown some WIPs and it was clear that for characters like Arthur, the upper dentures are not rigged to move at all. But with Grandsanta, his upper teeth can squish up with the rest of his cranium but also the molars move back into the head more with extreme expressions and it works perfectly for him. Not just that, but there's a excellent short shot of him saying a fond greeting to "EVE", his old sleigh. The walk cycles I saw, as well, were fairly good but only Arthur and Grandsanta really had any individuality which I assume was a direction choice.

The tone of the movie is more adolescent than child (at one point Arthur says "that's impossible!" and the Grandsanta responds with "“we used to think it was impossible to teach women to read") which works for what it's doing and I think there will be genuine moments of laughter. The director, Sarah Smith, comes from a live action background and it's not completely unnoticed in the result. The acting choices are much more toned down than I think they should be, considering their designs, and the gags are all relatively feasible to be done in real life which sometimes begs the question "why is this animated?" A lot of the camera movements were long sweeping shots which I'm getting really tired of seeing in EVERY CG movie but I have no doubt that they'll look amazing in 3D (yes, you heard me... ANOTHER movie in 3D). Actually, a lot of the early scenes were clearly there solely because it would be in 3D and not any other reason. It'll look good but if you see it in normal projection like I did you'll be wondering "why all the flying about?"

I will say that I have higher hopes for the 2nd & 3rd acts than what I saw in the first and a very large part of that is Grandsanta. Mark my words: Grandsanta will steal this movie. If you're looking for a film to go see next weekend anyway you could do worse than this, but it doesn't look like a rush out and see-it kind of flick.