The 25 Weird Days of Christmas Day 24: "The Snowman and the Snowdog"

"The Snowman", the nearly wordless and gorgeous animated short based upon Raymond Briggs' entirely wordless picture book (graphic novel?  Sure, why not), is such a strange, melancholy Christmas special, isn't it?  It captures the weirdly bleak and lonely aspects of winter and the Christmas season in such a beautiful, haunting way.  It is a sad, lonely sort of Christmas special for sad, lonely children.

That's precisely why I love it; it's one of the many beautiful and slightly unsettling animated films that affected me deeply as a child and hit many of those exact same buttons as an adult. "Snowman" honestly stands with "Watership Down", "Brave Little Toaster", "The Mouse and his Child", "The Secret of NIMH" and "The Last Unicorn" as Animation That Knocked Me Right On My Ass And Permanently Changed My Entire Philosophy Of Life When I Was, Like, Five.  (Anyone who has been following my Internet shenanigans for a while is probably nodding sagely and thinking, "Yeah.  Yeah, Trish seeing those particular animations at a young age explains a lot.")

I had every reason in the world to assume that "The Snowman and the Snowdog", a new sequel short created for the 30'th anniversary of "The Snowman", would be, in so many words, not that.  I've never been so happy to be so very wrong.



It's so damn sad, but it's a worthy successor to the original.  You can find it and the original "Snowman" on Hulu.  Merry Christmas, everyone!

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Art of the Day

Ah, my feels!