Christmas Comes But Once a Year USA, NR, 9 m, 1936
The Fleischer Brothers’ Christmas Comes But Once a Year is in many ways a companion piece to their whimsical masterwork, Somewhere in Dreamland. Both “Color Classics” take place during the Great Depression and both feature cherub-faced ragamuffins (or hard-up Campbell Kids) for whom the magic of Christmas is sadly out of reach. But Christmas Comes But Once a Year isn’t as heartrending as Somewhere in Dreamland—it’s more raucous, zany. The setting is a drafty, tumbledown orphanage—a Dickensian nightmare that’s conspicuously sans adult supervision. (Are the folks in charge getting schnockered on cups of cheer at the alehouse across the way?) Little patched stockings dangle from the fireplace mantle, next to which stands an undernourished Yule tree that has lost most of its needles. (The one Charlie Brown came up with for the holiday pageant was downright lush by comparison.) When the sun finally brings on the high point of the hap-happiest season of all, the dormitory (its beds, as you would expect, are outfitted with lumpy, mite-infested mattresses and tattered sheets) bursts to life, and the children—a strangely androgynous lot—skip barefoot to the mess of playthings that awaits them whilst singing the jolliest of jingles: Christmas comes
but once a year. And
they’re given the kinds of presents that still bring ankle-biters lots of joy
and cheer today: a popgun, a tricycle, a Teddy Bear. But after just a few
minutes of play, it becomes painfully apparent that Santa’s workshop has been
cutting corners: the toys literally fall to pieces. So now the kids (any one of
whom I’m sure wasn’t nearly naughty enough to deserve this big lump of coal
up the ol’ wazoo) are sitting amongst a heap of useless junk, wailing at the
top of their lungs. But was Papá Noel the one who jerked these strays, or was
it the grasping, soulless creatures who run the orphanage? Hard to say, but the
tots’ pitiful cries can be heard all the way outside, alerting Professor
Grampy, who’s happening by in his motorized sled, to their predicament. He
slips through a window in the kitchen and grabs whatever utensil or appliance he
can to fashion a new batch of toys: a tea kettle and a set of saucers become a
train engine, a lidded pot and some string become a ukulele, and a doohickey and
a thingamajig become a whatchamacallit. Gags like this were a Fleischer
trademark; producer Max, after all, shared Grampy’s obsession with inventing
stuff. Only the angels know how many patents Max acquired through the years, but
the one he held on the rotoscope, a device animators could use to trace over
live-action film, transformed the industry. (It gave those early Disney pictures
like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs their eerily fluid sense of motion.)
Another one of Max's more noteworthy creations was the rotograph, which
enabled animated characters to move around in three-dimensional environments.
The effects it produced in Somewhere in Dreamland were striking, and
it’s also put to good use in Christmas Comes But Once a Year,
particularly during the final shot in which the waifs and Grampy (this was the
only time he didn’t serve as a co-star to Betty Boop) dance around an
impossibly huge Christmas tree that makes the one in Rockefeller Center look
like, well, a Charlie Brown tree. December 25, 2009 © Copyright 2009 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
|