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Bizarre Christmas Cartoons: Evil Snowmen, Santa Embryos, And Psychedelic Holiday Tales

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I love Rudolph, the Grinch, and Charlie Brown as much as anybody else, but if you’re looking for holiday-themed animation off the beaten track, we’re here to clue you in to some off-the-wall Christmas cartoons you may have missed.

Let’s kick things off with the absurdist gem The Christmas Card (1968), the film where future Monty Python member Terry Gilliam developed his paper cutout style. According to Gilliam, “I went down to the Tate and they’ve got a huge collection of Victorian Christmas cards so I went through the collection and photocopied things and started moving them around. So the style just developed out of that rather than any planning being involved.” The result is hilariously irreverent but also charmingly playful.

Eighteen years before Frosty the Snowman made his debut in the popular holiday song, animator Ted Eshbaugh created The Snowman (1932), in which a snowman comes to life… and proceeds to go on a monstrous rampage of evil. The way this seemingly cheerful wintertime frolic suddenly turns nightmarish makes this short uniquely strange, especially as the cartoon provides no explanation for the snowman’s wickedness. I encountered this beautifully-drawn oddball in black & white on one of those bargain-bin VHS tapes as a kid, but this great print from Thunderbean restores this forgotten classic back to its original two-color Technicolor glory.

Walter Lantz’s Merry Dog (1933), starring short-lived cartoon star Pooch the Pup, is a particularly underrated Christmas cartoon. The film tells the story of a ferocious wolf who impersonates Santa in order to eat Pooch and his girlfriend. The great rubber-hose animator Bill Nolan offers up a constant stream of ludicrous sight gags here, all delivered with a deadpan lack of sentimentality and capped off with an amusingly macabre final joke. This short deserves a good restoration and a cult following.

One of my all-time favorite holiday shorts is the Van Beuren cartoon Pals (1933), where the Little King brings two of his hobo friends into his castle to sleep and bathe together as they await Santa Claus. This off-kilter short (available on Thunderbean’s Complete Animated Adventures of the Little King Blu-ray) builds up to a crescendo of chaos as the three men giddily destroy the castle with their new toys. I’m not sure if the final gag – in which the king hiccups a bubble, just like his friend has been doing throughout the cartoon – is supposed to imply that the soap flew out of the hobo’s throat and into the king’s, or if the king accidentally swallowed the hobo in the crash. See what you think:

Perhaps the zaniest of all Christmas cartoons is Tex Avery’s One Ham’s Family (1943), in which a wolf dresses up as Santa Claus (a common theme in old cartoons) in order to eat a couple of pigs and their obnoxious brat son. Nothing is safe from ridicule in an Avery cartoon, including the people watching it, and here Avery reaches Andy Kaufman-levels of trolling the audience with patience-testing silliness.

The stop-motion Christmas film Adventures of Toys by Katsuo Takahashi was created for the Japan Expo of 1970 as a way of encouraging exchanges with foreign countries. The goal of this particular short was to promote the Japanese toy industry. Stylistically, it feels like a cross between one of those Rankin-Bass specials (which were animated in Japan) and a Godzilla movie. There are some pretty wild tonal shifts in the opening scenes here:

Dutch animator Paul Driessen is the master of presenting ideas in cleverly unexpected ways, such as splitting the screen into multiple panels with interlocking stories or creating a narrative from the inside of an egg. In his short An Old Box (1975), he puts his own psychedelic spin on the Nativity story.

A standout among the many Christmas tv specials produced over the years is Clive A. Smith’s A Cosmic Christmas (1977), a trippy sci-fi fable with a memorable synthesizer soundtrack. This was the first fully-animated film by the prolific Canadian studio Nelvana, and they really knocked it out of the park by creating such lush animation on a tv budget. George Lucas was so impressed by the film that he hired the studio to animate the cartoon segment of the notorious Star Wars Holiday Special (the only section of the special that anyone seems to like).

Some of the best holiday cartoons of the 20th century come from the Soviet Union, although they aren’t technically Christmas cartoons. Following the Russian Revolution, Christmas was banned by the Communist Party for being “bourgeois and religious,” and so typical Christmas traditions were shifted to the New Year’s holiday Novy God. The Santa Claus equivalent in this holiday is the Slavic winter spirit Ded Moroz (usually translated as Father Frost), who puts on a show in the clay-animated short New Year’s Eve Song by Ded Moroz (1982). Genius animator Alexander Tatarsky (who also directed the cult classic Last Year’s Snow Was Falling) was always filling up his films with crazy sight gags and surreal transformations, which caused the censors to suspect he might be sending coded messages to foreign intelligence through his cartoons.

Speaking of communism: one of the darkest and oddest of all Christmas cartoons is the Polish film The Star, which was fittingly made in 1984. The film misleadingly opens in Santa’s workshop, before we shift to a desolate futuristic society run by identical bald men in crowns who keep constant surveillance on their citizens; the people are finally awakened from their numb complacency by following the Star of Bethlehem. The communist authorities in Poland, who apparently didn’t have a sense of humor about themselves, ordered animator Witold Giersz to remove the image of the giant red eye that watches over the people, but Giersz refused, so the film was withdrawn and denied distribution. Giersz was also forbidden from completing the second and third parts of his planned trilogy, leaving the film’s peculiar story unresolved.

Rankin-Bass specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer are perennial classics, but one that never got much airplay is The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1985), the last of the studio’s stop-motion specials. Based on a book by Wizard of Oz creator L. Frank Baum, the special – in which the Great Ak pleads with the council of the Immortals to grant Santa Claus everlasting life – is less whimsical than earlier Rankin-Bass efforts, and is instead a high fantasy in the Lord of the Rings vein (but still animated in the quirky Animagic style). The special’s grave tone while delivering its illogical story makes it seem like an adaptation of some nonexistent Santa-based religion. The villainous Awgwas would make great toys.

How’s this for a plot? In the Canadian short Lucretia (1986), a curious demon distracts the angel Gabriel by burning his toast, and she takes the opportunity to escape Hell and find out what Christmas is all about. The setup might be unusual, but this is actually a very sweet film, with beautiful artwork by designer/director/animator Heidi Blomkvist.

Have you ever wondered how all of the various Santas from different cultures came about? Well, I’m glad you asked: little Santa hatchlings in ice eggs are grown in a frozen incubator room by snowmen and are assigned to deliver presents in different parts of the world, of course. We learn all of this and more in the Soviet stop-motion short Frost-Frost (1986), directed by Leonid Zarubin. I love that the little Santas are already sporting beards and mittens when they hatch.

You might be surprised to learn that Ralph Bakshi, director of grungy X-rated features like Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic, once directed a Christmas special, and it aired on Nickelodeon of all places. Christmas in Tattertown (1988) was intended to be a pilot for a tv series about a magical world where all of the junk that humans throw away comes alive. The series never materialized, but it was notable for being one of the first cartoons commissioned by Nickelodeon and for featuring early work by an array of future animation greats. The special itself is a work of unrestrained chaos, with ancillary creatures who look like they stepped out of a 1920s comic strip constantly squiggling all around the screen, distracting from any semblance of a plot. There seems to be a fairly typical story about the true meaning of Christmas somewhere in here, but it’s buried under layers of freewheeling cartoon nonsense. Remember when you could smoke cigars and fire machine guns on a kids’ tv network?

Not to be outdone by Nickelodeon in the weirdness department, Cartoon Network aired a special by famed indie animator Bill Plympton entitled 12 Tiny Christmas Tales (2001), which was based on Christmas cards Plympton drew for his parents over the years. The segments, all drawn in colored pencil by Plympton himself, range from cute to comically twisted.

We featured Pat Ventura’s work in our recent rundown of great wild takes, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the gleefully demented short George and Junior’s Christmas Spectacular (1995), a segment from Cartoon Network’s What a Cartoon! anthology series. George and Junior are characters Tex Avery created back in the 1940s, but Ventura injects them with an extra dose of holiday hysteria.

That’s all for us, but how about you? Which bizarre Christmas cartoons left an impact on you? Let us know in the comments, and have a very merry Yak Shaving Day!

Pictured at top: New Year’s Eve Song by Ded Moroz by Alexander Tatarsky.

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