A true tail of Christmas spirit.
A Christmas Gift from Bob (2020)
James Bowen finds himself the target of an animal welfare investigation that threatens to take away his beloved cat, Bob, at Christmas.
rating 7/10 User rating 104 votes 67% ❄ Christmas Connection
A Gift from Bob is set entirely at Christmas, with the holiday season as both backdrop and emotional anchor. James Bowen's struggle to keep his beloved cat while busking in a festive London forms the heart of the story. The film's themes of generosity, survival, and unexpected grace during the darkest months of winter are as Christmas as it gets.
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Bob the cat died on 15 June 2020, struck by a car near his home in Surrey. He was believed to be around 14 to 16 years old. He had already finished filming his final movie. A Gift from Bob, the Christmas sequel to the 2016 biographical hit A Street Cat Named Bob, was released in UK cinemas on 6 November 2020, five months after his death. Every frame of his screen time carries the weight of that timing.
That unintended elegiac quality is the thing that separates this film from ordinary seasonal fare. It was not made as a farewell. It just became one.
What A Gift from Bob Is Actually About
The film reunites Luke Treadaway with the role that launched his mainstream career: James Bowen, the real-life street musician who found a ginger stray on his London doorstep in 2007 and, with the cat's help, rebuilt his life from drug addiction and homelessness. The first film covered that arc. This sequel, written again by Garry Jenkins and directed by Charles Martin Smith, zooms in on a specific Christmas.
Bowen is now a year into sobriety, selling The Big Issue outside Angel Tube station with Bob riding on his shoulder. A welfare officer flags a concern about the cat's living conditions. The prospect of losing Bob during the Christmas period is the story's engine. It sounds thin on paper, and at 96 minutes, the film does not pretend otherwise. But the emotional geometry works: a man who clawed his way back from addiction holds onto the one relationship that never required him to explain himself.
Anna Wilson-Jones plays the welfare officer with a cool restraint that resists caricature. She is not a villain. The film is sensible enough to know that the interesting question is not "will they take Bob?" but "what does it cost James to trust another human being?"
Luke Treadaway and the Chemistry with an Actual Cat
The original film earned its reputation largely because the bond between Treadaway and Bob read as completely genuine on screen. That is not a small thing. Most animal performances in film are stitched together in editing; what made the first Street Cat Named Bob unusual was that Bob was a genuinely companionable presence who sat still, made eye contact, and apparently had no anxiety about cameras or crowds.
He was the same here. Additional cats were used as stand-ins for some scenes, but the real Bob appears throughout. Treadaway, who was already 32 when the original was filmed in 2016, slides back into Bowen's guarded, slightly hunched posture without effort. He has always been underused by mainstream cinema, and this franchise has been a strange but fitting home for him.
The film was shot partly on location at the real Angel Tube station and surrounding streets, which gives it a texture that studio-bound Christmas movies lack. There is something distinctly London about a man in a worn coat busking carols while commuters barrel past him, and the film knows not to tidy that up too much.
A Christmas Movie for People Who Don't Like Christmas Movies
The film is set at Christmas and does not hide it. There are fairy lights, carol singers, mince pies, and a final act with the kind of emotional release that the season demands from its cinema. But the register is closer to Ken Loach than to Richard Curtis. The Christmas sentiment here is earned the hard way, through a story about poverty, recovery, and the specific cruelty of bureaucratic systems that operate on their own schedule regardless of what month it is.
That is not a criticism. It is the film's most honest quality. James Bowen's real Christmases during his years on the streets were not warm or magical. The film does not flinch from that, even while it moves toward a warmer conclusion.
The first film grossed nearly $18 million worldwide on an $8 million budget. This sequel pulled in around $1.58 million at the global box office. That drop reflects a smaller release window and the pandemic rather than any dramatic fall in quality. The film is simply less essential than its predecessor, because the origin story has already been told.
Bob, in the End
The closing credits dedicate the film to Bob's memory. It is understated, which is right. The cat needed no embellishment in life, and he needs none in the credits.
What the film does with its final act is give Bob a proper Christmas scene, the kind the real James Bowen would have recognised from that last good winter they shared before everything changed. If you've come this far with the franchise, that scene alone is worth the 96 minutes.
Fun Facts
Bob the cat died on 15 June 2020, approximately six months after filming on A Gift from Bob was completed. He escaped through a skylight that had been accidentally left open and was struck by a car near his Surrey home.
Director Charles Martin Smith is best known as an actor, having played Terry the Toad in American Graffiti (1973) and FBI accountant Oscar Wallace in The Untouchables (1987). He also directed A Street Cat Named Bob in 2016, making him one of the few directors to helm both entries in a franchise about a cat.
Bob was estimated to be between 14 and 16 years old at the time of his death, making him elderly by domestic cat standards. James Bowen found him as a stray in 2007, meaning Bob had lived with Bowen for roughly 13 of those years.
The original A Street Cat Named Bob book, published in 2012, spent over a year on the Sunday Times bestseller list. By the time of Bob's death in 2020, the Bob-related books had sold over 8 million copies worldwide and been translated into dozens of languages.
Filming took place at the real Angel Tube station in Islington, the location where James Bowen and Bob became local celebrities selling The Big Issue. The station's regular commuters served as unplanned extras throughout production.
Garry Jenkins, who wrote the screenplay for both films, also co-wrote the original memoir with James Bowen. This makes the adaptation an unusually direct line from the real events to the screen, with the source writer controlling the translation throughout.
The UK release date of 6 November 2020 placed the film squarely in the pre-Christmas cinema window. An accompanying soundtrack album was released on the same date, a rarity for a low-budget British biographical drama.
Bob's ginger colouring and his habit of sitting on Bowen's shoulder while he busked made the pair so recognisable that tourists would specifically seek them out at Angel station. Several social media accounts devoted to Bob had accumulated hundreds of thousands of followers before the first film was even released.
Cast
