Elliot: The Littlest Reindeer (2018)

Somewhere in the development meetings for Elliot the Littlest Reindeer, somebody made decisions that seemed, on paper, completely reasonable. Hire Josh Hutcherson off the back of The Hunger Games. Get Samantha Bee, then at peak cultural visibility with her own late-night show. Bring in John Cleese, the grandest available voice of British authority. Hand the villain to Martin Short, who also plays the retiring Blitzen and Santa's elf assistant, because apparently three roles are better than one. The result is a 2018 Canadian animated Christmas film that never quite figures out what to do with any of them.

The premise is genuinely likable. Blitzen, the smallest of Santa's reindeer, announces his retirement on December 21st. Tryouts at the North Pole open immediately. Elliot, a miniature horse who has worshipped reindeer his whole life, has exactly three days to show up and earn a spot on the team. His best friend Hazel, a goat voiced by Bee, goes along to help. It's an underdog sports movie wrapped in Christmas tinsel, and that structure works. The three-day countdown gives the film a real engine.

What Actually Works in Elliot the Littlest Reindeer

John Cleese playing Donner as a patrician, slightly contemptuous elder reindeer is exactly right. Cleese has spent decades perfecting the voice of someone who considers your existence a mild inconvenience, and Donner fits that instrument perfectly. He gets the film's sharpest lines and delivers them with the weary precision of a man who has been doing this since 1978 and genuinely cannot believe it has come to this.

Samantha Bee's Hazel works better than expected. The goat sidekick could have been pure comic-relief wallpaper, but Bee plays her as someone with actual opinions, which makes the friendship with Elliot feel less mechanical than most animated-film buddy pairings. She's the film's moral center, and Bee commits to the material without coasting.

Hutcherson's Elliot is likable without being memorable. The character design, the wide eyes and compact proportions that mark him as the smallest thing in every room, does more emotional work than the dialogue. The Toronto-based animation studio Awesometown Entertainment, which previously made Get Squirrely in 2015, produces clean if unremarkable CGI. The North Pole looks like the North Pole is supposed to look. The reindeer look like reindeer. Nobody is going to call this visually inventive, but it's competent work.

Where the Film Loses the Thread

Martin Short playing three characters is the film's central structural problem. Lemondrop the elf assistant, Ms. Ludzinka the scheming landowner who wants to buy Elliot's farm, and Blitzen himself form a triangle of Short-ness that keeps collapsing the film's tone. Short is one of the most technically skilled comic performers alive. He is also, in the wrong context, an awful lot of Martin Short. Elliot is that context.

The Ludzinka subplot, in which the villain wants to convert Elliot's farm into a spa resort, sits awkwardly alongside the North Pole tryout plot. Neither story has enough room to breathe. The film is 89 minutes, which should be sufficient, but it spends too long cutting between storylines that aren't generating enough tension to justify the cuts.

Jeff Dunham voices two characters including a miniature horse named Peanutbutter, which is a fine name for a miniature horse. Morena Baccarin plays Corkie, the chipper North Pole official running the tryouts. Both are fine. Neither is given anything that rises above plot function.

The Honest Assessment of This Film's Audience

The Rotten Tomatoes score of 29% tells you what adult critics thought. It tells you almost nothing about the film's actual audience, which is children aged four to eight watching it on Netflix on December 22nd while their parents are still wrapping presents. For that audience, Elliot the Littlest Reindeer is perfectly calibrated. The underdog wins. The friendship holds. The North Pole tryout sequence delivers real excitement. Donner thaws just enough. The farm is saved.

The film knows its job and does it. The problem is purely one of ambition versus execution: the voice cast suggests a film with a bigger vision than the script actually delivers. You don't get Josh Hutcherson, Samantha Bee, John Cleese, Martin Short, Morena Baccarin, and Jeff Dunham for a film content to be merely adequate. But adequate is largely what it is, and adequacy in a Christmas children's film is not the catastrophe critics made it out to be.

It released November 30, 2018, the Friday after Thanksgiving in the United States, and landed on Netflix, which is where most people have seen it. Somewhere in that gap between theatrical ambition and streaming comfort, Elliot the Littlest Reindeer found its natural home.