Disney “Prep & Landing” and “Arthur Christmas” take polar opposite approaches to the world of the North Pole

Jim Hill

13 years ago

Just a quick heads up for all of you Wayne & Lanny fans
out there. Tonight’s the night when ABC will be airing both “Prep & Landings”
holiday specials (i.e. The Emmy Award-winning original as well as its 2011
follow-up, “Naughty vs. Nice”) back-to-back from 8 – 9 p.m. ET.

For me, half the fun of watching these Walt Disney Animation
Studios productions are the story-driven design choices that directors Kevin
Deters & Stevie Wermers-Skelton (along with “Prep & Landing” ‘s
production designer Andy Harkness) made on these two holiday specials.

Take – for example – Mr. and Mrs. Claus. Because Disney “Prep
& Landing” stories are always told from the elf point-of-view, Santa
literally is the Big Guy. He and his wife tower over Lanny, Wayne, Magee and
Noel. Which is why – whenever the audience sees the Clauses in these holiday
specials – you typically only see them from the waist down. A boot here or a hand
there.

And this was a deliberate choice on Kevin, Stevie and Andy’s
part because – to be honest – they wanted to preserve some of the myth, mystery
and magic that surrounds Santa.

Now contrast that with the approach that Evgeni Tomov took
with “Arthur Christmas.” Given that this Aardman & Sony Pictures Animation
film is all about a Christmas Eve conflict within the Claus clan, Tomov – as the
production designer of this project – couldn’t do as Deters, Wermers-Skeleton
& Harkness did. Evgeni had to put Arthur & family front-and-center.
More importantly, had to make these seemingly mythic characters all too human
and down-to-earth so that moviegoers could then relate to the Clauses.

“Finding just the
right look for Santa’s family was one of the key decisions on ‘Arthur Christmas,’
” Tomov explained during a recent phone call. “Once Sarah (EDITOR’S NOTE: Sarah
Smith is the director of “Arthur Christmas”) and I settled on the level of design
& stylization that we were going to use with these characters … Well, that
then drove the look of the rest of the movie. Because once we knew what the
Clauses looked like, we then have a far better sense of what the world that the
Clauses lived in & moved through looked like.”

Speaking of which … When it came to Santa’s world, the
people who worked on Disney “Prep & landing” and those who designed Aardman
& Sony Pictures Animation’s “Arthur Christmas” took polar opposite
approaches when it came to the North Pole.

When it came to “Prep & Landing” ‘s version of the North
Pole, Disney deliberately wanted a mix of the familiar (which is why you’ll see
all sorts of sly little nods to holiday specials of the past folded into these
WDAS productions. Take – for example – that Charlie Brown Christmas tree which
Magee keeps in her office) and the clever (EX: How all of the devices that
Wayne & Lanny uses when they’re doing their prep & landing work are
classic Christmas shapes. The candy cane grappling hooks. The gingerbread man-shaped scanner. So that if any of these items accidentally got left behind,
the humans in the house wouldn’t realize that they were secret hi-tech
devices).

Whereas when it came to Sarah Smith’s vision of Santa’s workshop,
she had a very different place in mind.

“Right from the get-go, Sarah wanted ‘Arthur Christmas’ to
be a contemporary film. So the version of the North Pole that we went with for
our movie deliberately avoids the storybook stylization that you see in most
holiday specials,” Tomov continued. “We wanted to show the audience how Santa would
actually have to do it these days, deliver all of those toys to all of those children
around the world in a single night. Which explains the S-1, the two mile-long
sleighship as well as those 15,000 elves who work in Mission Control.”

Of course, the irony of all this is – when you get right
down to it – the “Prep & Landing” holiday specials as well as “Arthur
Christmas” do tell similar sorts of tales. In that the characters at the very
heart of these stories really go above & beyond the call in order to make
Christmas better for a single child.

“I have to admit that – when I first read the script for ‘Arthur
Christmas’ in the Fall of 2008 – I was a little put off by the scale of the
thing. This movie was so ambitious. It literally traveled ’round the globe –
Africa, Canada, Mexico, the North Pole, the U.K. – as it told its story,” Tomov
said. “But the story that Sarah wanted to to tell with this movie had so much
soul & heart that I couldn’t not be a part of it. So I signed on to be ‘Arthur
Christmas’ ‘s production designer and basically built the art department for
this movie from the ground-up.

So what’s Evgeni’s ultimate hope for this Aardman & Sony
Pictures Animation production? Does he want “Arthur Christmas” to go the “Prep and Landing” / “A Charlie Brown Christmas” route and quickly become a holiday
perennial?

“That’s be nice,” Tomov admitted. “But that honestly wasn’t
what I was thinking when I was working on ‘Arthur Christmas.’ I just wanted to
make sure that all of the production design choices which Sarah & I were
making here properly serviced the story that we were trying to tell here. That this
project lived up to its true potential. That we were then able to tell a story
about this family who lives at the North Pole in a way that audiences could
really relate to but still preserved all of this story’s humor & heart.”

So if you’d like to see both sides of this Santa scenario,
why not check out both “Prep & Landing” holiday specials on ABC tonight (or
– if that’s just not doable – watch the “Naughty vs. Nice” rerun which will be airing
on the Alphabet Network tomorrow night between 9 – 9:30 p.m. ET) and then swing
out to your local multiplex this coming weekend to catch “Arthur Christmas.” I’ll
genuinely be intrigued to hear which Polar
approach you people prefer.

Your thoughts?

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