Blizzard (2003)
A young girl's aunt tells her the tale of a young ice skater and an enchanted reindeer.
rating 5/10 User rating 81 votes 59% ❄ Christmas Connection
The entire film is set against a Christmas backdrop, with Santa Claus, the North Pole, and reindeer as central elements. Blizzard is a reindeer born to Blitzen himself, and the story resolves on Christmas Eve. There is no reading this one as anything other than a Christmas movie.
Where to Watch
Our Review
There is something quietly remarkable about Blizzard, the 2003 family film directed by LeVar Burton, and it has almost nothing to do with the movie itself. Before this film, Burton had spent years directing episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. His first theatrical feature was a Canadian Christmas production about a magical reindeer voiced by Whoopi Goldberg. That is either a bold career move or a very strange one, depending on your point of view.
The setup is a story-within-a-story. Young Jess is sad because her best friend has moved away. Her aunt sits her down and tells her a tale about Katie, a ten-year-old girl in a small town who lives to ice skate. In the North Pole, meanwhile, a reindeer named Blizzard has just been born to Blitzen, and she turns out to be unusually gifted: she can fly, turn invisible, and navigate by empathy. She feels Katie's grief from miles away and, breaking every rule Santa has about contact with humans, flies down to help.
The Cast Blizzard Assembled
On paper, this is a peculiar ensemble. Christopher Plummer plays Santa Claus with the kind of authoritative warmth that makes you realize how few actors can actually pull that role off. Brenda Blethyn plays Aunt Millie, the storytelling aunt, and brings her usual precision to a role that could easily drift into generic. Kevin Pollak plays Archimedes, the head elf and the film's designated antagonist, which is a genuinely odd bit of casting that works better than expected.
Whoopi Goldberg voices Blizzard herself, giving the reindeer a personality that's warmer and more grounded than the animated reindeer-as-comic-relief you might fear. The young actress Zoe Warner carries the film as Katie. She's a convincing skater and a capable screen presence, which matters in a film where the camera returns to her face constantly to track emotional beats.
The story was created by Agnes Bristow and Leif Bristow, a mother and son team, with Leif also appearing in the film as the voice of Blitzen. Murray McRae wrote the screenplay. There is something almost quaint about a family writing a family film. Whether it makes for a better movie is another matter.
What Works and What Doesn't
The film's central conceit is more interesting than it sounds. Blizzard isn't just a magical helper; she's a reindeer who violates North Pole law twice to protect a child she has never met. That's a meaningful story choice. It gives Blizzard genuine stakes and makes the third act feel earned rather than inevitable.
What works less well is the pacing in the film's middle section. The story-within-a-story structure means the film switches between two timelines and two emotional registers, and the transitions are sometimes clumsy. Burton handles the North Pole sequences with more confidence than the quieter human scenes, where the film occasionally idles.
The ice skating sequences deserve credit. Filming took place at Port Credit Memorial Arena in Mississauga, Ontario, and the choreography has real momentum to it. Whoever coached Zoe Warner for the role did solid work. The skating doesn't feel like a soft-focus afterthought added for charm.
LeVar Burton's Feature Debut
Burton had directed more than 30 television episodes before Blizzard, almost all of them in the Star Trek universe. Coming from that world, where the visual grammar is tight and the storytelling is compression-focused, to a two-timeline family Christmas film is a real adjustment. The film shows both sides of that background. The setups are competent and the technical execution is clean. The emotional looseness that good family films need, the kind that makes a child cry at the right moment, arrives more intermittently.
The production had a practical problem worth noting. Principal photography began in February 2002 in southern Ontario, and the winter was unusually warm. The crew manufactured large quantities of artificial snow to compensate. The result is a film that looks white and wintry in every frame, which suggests the production design team solved a serious logistical problem without leaving visible seams.
The film won Best of the Fest at the Chicago International Children's Film Festival and earned a Directors Guild of Canada team award. Those are real recognitions, not participation trophies, and they suggest the film connected with the audience it was made for.
Is Blizzard Worth Watching?
If you are looking for a Christmas film to watch with children under twelve, Blizzard is a reasonable choice. It's not sharp enough to land on any adult's list of seasonal favorites, and the story resolves in the way you expect from the first fifteen minutes. But Plummer's Santa is genuinely good. Goldberg's voice work is warm without being cloying. And the core idea of a reindeer who breaks the rules because she literally cannot feel anything else makes for a more compelling protagonist than many Christmas films manage.
For a film that premiered in October 2003 and briefly played theaters before moving to cable and home video, it has held up better than its IMDB rating of 5.8 suggests. The Rotten Tomatoes score sits at 67 percent from a small handful of reviews, and that feels closer to accurate.
The film's best single image is also its most quietly absurd: Christopher Plummer in full Santa regalia, delivering a solemn judgment in a courtroom-style North Pole proceeding, while a reindeer stands accused. Plummer plays it completely straight, as only someone with that much stage and screen experience can.
Fun Facts
LeVar Burton, best known as Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation and as the 23-year host of Reading Rainbow, made his theatrical feature film directorial debut with Blizzard. He had previously directed over 30 episodes of Star Trek television series before taking on this project.
The story was created by Agnes Bristow and her son Leif Bristow, making it a literal family production. Leif also provided the voice of Blitzen in the film, meaning he voiced the father of the reindeer his own family invented.
Production began in February 2002 in southern Ontario, but an unusually warm winter forced the crew to manufacture large amounts of artificial snow throughout the shoot. The film is set in a snowbound winter world that almost entirely did not exist when the cameras were rolling.
The ice skating sequences were filmed at Port Credit Memorial Arena in Mississauga, Ontario. Lead actress Zoe Warner trained specifically for the role to perform the skating scenes convincingly.
Exterior scenes were shot in Quebec City, where the historic Place Royale district provided the small-town winter setting. The contrast between an actual historic French-Canadian square and artificial Ontario snow is a minor triumph of location scouting.
The film won the Best of the Fest award at the Chicago International Children's Film Festival and the Directors Guild of Canada Team Award, two separate recognitions from two different countries.
Blizzard the reindeer has three distinct magical powers in the film: the ability to fly, the power to turn invisible, and a form of empathic navigation that lets her sense the emotions of children far away. The script specifically states she was born with all three, which is described as exceptionally rare even by North Pole standards.
Christopher Plummer, who plays Santa Claus, had by 2003 already appeared in The Sound of Music (1965), Murder by Decree (1979), and dozens of other major productions. He went on to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2012 for Beginners, becoming the oldest competitive Oscar winner in history at age 82.
Cast
