An Almost Christmas Story (2024)

In November 2020, workers setting up the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree discovered a small northern saw-whet owl alive inside the branches, having survived a 170-mile journey from Oneonta, New York without food or water. The internet named him Rocky, he was rehabilitated and released, and everyone agreed it was exactly the kind of story 2020 needed. Four years later, Disney handed the story to David Lowery, the director behind "Pete's Dragon," "A Ghost Story," and "Peter Pan and Wendy," and asked him to do something with it. The result is An Almost Christmas Story, a 28-minute animated short that is considerably more interior and melancholic than the cheerful premise suggests.

That's not a criticism. It's what makes it worth watching.

What the Film Is Actually About

The plot follows Moon, a young owl who gets swept into a Christmas tree destined for Rockefeller Center. He can't get out. In trying to find his way home, he meets Luna, a girl who is herself somewhat lost. The owl-meets-girl setup could easily become saccharine. Lowery keeps it grounded by letting both characters feel genuinely disoriented rather than pluckily determined.

Jim Gaffigan voices Papa Owl, and the casting makes sense. Gaffigan has built a career on portraying a specific kind of well-meaning, slightly overwhelmed father, and that register translates surprisingly well into animated form. John C. Reilly plays the Folk Singer, a narrator-adjacent character who delivers four songs, two of them original. The songs are where the short leans closest to classic Rankin/Bass territory, and Reilly commits fully.

The Visual Approach and Why It Works

Lowery originally planned to shoot the film in live action. Then he wanted stop-motion, which he had worked with early in his career. Budget and timeline constraints pushed the production toward CG, but the team designed the film to look handmade anyway. Cardboard textures, visible craft-paper edges, wood-grain backgrounds: the CG mimics the imperfections of physical puppetry rather than erasing them.

The result lands closer to felt-board children's book illustration than to any recent Disney theatrical release. That's deliberate. The aesthetic signals immediately that this is not trying to compete with "Encanto" or "Wish." It is doing something smaller and more concentrated.

The Rockefeller Center sequences are the visual highlight. Lowery and his team render the tree from the inside, so the viewer shares Moon's perspective: towering branches, muffled city sounds, the strange filtered light of ten thousand bulbs seen through a wall of Norway spruce. It is a genuinely unusual way to depict one of the most photographed trees in the world.

Alfonso Cuaron's Role

Alfonso Cuaron served as producer, which is a notable collaboration given that Cuaron's own filmography includes "Y Tu Mama Tambien," "Children of Men," and "Gravity." He is not an obvious choice to shepherd a 28-minute Disney holiday short. The combination suggests the project attracted genuine talent rather than being a filler assignment, and the craft on screen supports that reading.

Cuaron and Lowery developed the story together. Lowery has spoken in interviews about wanting the short to explore the specific anxiety of being in the wrong place, far from home, at exactly the moment everyone else seems to know where they belong. For a Christmas film, that is an unusual emotional center. Christmas stories usually resolve homesickness. This one takes it seriously first.

A Real Story Behind It

The real Rocky was a northern saw-whet owl, a species that rarely grows larger than a coffee mug. Saw-whet owls are nocturnal and rely on dense forest cover. Being transported inside a Norway spruce, then deposited in midtown Manhattan and discovered under 50,000 lights and several million tourists, is about as far from their natural habitat as it is possible to get. Rocky was taken to the Ravensbeard Wildlife Center in Saugerties, New York, rehydrated, fed, and released several days later.

The film does not replicate that story literally. Moon is younger, the girl Luna has no real-world counterpart, and the resolution takes a different shape. But the core image is intact: a tiny creature from a quiet place, surrounded by the most ostentatious Christmas spectacle on earth, trying to find the way back.

Who It's For

At 28 minutes, An Almost Christmas Story is short enough that impatient children won't lose the thread, and thoughtful enough that adults won't feel they're only watching it as an act of service. The pacing is slow by current animation standards. There are no action sequences. A family accustomed to "Moana 2" may find it quiet to the point of puzzlement.

That quietness is also its best quality. The film earns its emotional beats by not rushing them. When Moon finally sees the lit tree from the outside, surrounded by the city he was involuntarily brought to, the shot holds long enough to mean something.