Netflix’s Charming Holiday Feature ‘That Christmas’ Debuts Trailer
That Christmas marks the second animated feature from British producer Locksmith Animation, which last made Ron’s Gone Wrong, distributed by Disney in 2021. Set to release December 4 on Netflix, here’s the newly-launched trailer for That Christmas:
I saw the film a while back and happy to report that it’s a quite charming work that effectively conveys the warm, fuzzy feelings of Christmastime. As evidenced by the trailer, the film doesn’t tonally look or feel like a big-budget cg feature made by a U.S. studio. Its Englishness sparks from iconic British screenwriter Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually), who originally created That Christmas as a children’s book series and adapted the screenplay himself with Peter Souter.
These unHollywood qualities are what attracted director Simon Otto to the project. “It’s not a classic Hollywood animated film plot where you have a single hero going on a journey,” he said in the film’s press notes. “It’s a multi-threaded storyline. And that to me was interesting, because now you’re doing something that’s different structurally. You’re in a different world.” (Otto, who makes his feature directorial debut on this film, is an industry veteran who was head of character animation on the How to Train Your Dragon series.)
The different stories take place around England’s Suffolk coast, in a small town hit by a once-in-a-century blizzard that has threatened to cancel Christmas. The production design, headed up by Justin Hutchinson-Chatburn, is rooted in a type of idealized realism that emphasizes the comfort and charm of the geography. “I wanted to create a world that doesn’t require any processing by the audience,” Hutchinson-Chatburn explained in the press notes. “It needs to wrap its arms around the audience, like The Vicar of Dibley or Four Weddings and a Funeral. They all have that cozy quality.”
DNEG was the animation partner on the film and the animation director on the film is Kapil Sharma. Other key credits include Ashley Boddy (head of story), Doug Ikeler (vfx supervisor), Mike Redman (art director), Uwe Heidschötter (lead character designer), Justin Hutchinson-Chatburn (production designer), and Sim Evan-Jones (editor).
John Powell scored the film, with a song by Ed Sheeran. The film is produced by Nicole P. Hearon and Adam Tandy, and executive produced by Mary Coleman, Natalie Fischer, Julie Lockhart, Elisabeth Murdoch, Bonnie Arnold, Lara breay, Sarah Smith, Rebecca Cobb, Richard Curtis, and Colin Hopkins.
