The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland (2024)

Someone at Lupus Films looked at a children's picture book mashing up Lewis Carroll and Clement Clarke Moore and decided it had legs as a feature film. They were right. The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland, released on Hulu and Prime Video on November 15, 2024, is a proper animated musical with a proper voice cast, a proper score, and a visual sensibility that earns comparison to the illustrated book it adapts. Given how many holiday streaming films treat "good enough for kids" as an acceptable standard, that is worth saying clearly.

What the Film Is, and Why the Concept Actually Works

The premise sounds like a pitch meeting accident: Santa Claus receives a years-delayed letter from the Princess of Hearts and sets off with his reindeer to deliver a gift in Wonderland, where the Queen of Hearts has outlawed Christmas. Alice joins the rescue effort. The Mad Hatter and March Hare provide comic relief. The Queen must be converted.

The book, written by Carys Bexington and illustrated by Kate Hindley, was published by Macmillan and became a bestseller. Lupus Films producer Ruth Fielding read it and immediately recognized it as a Lupus project. NBCUniversal agreed, commissioning Sara Daddy to expand the picture book into a feature-length screenplay, which she wrote entirely in rhyming couplets. That constraint is either a charming quirk or a mild headache depending on how much you enjoy rhyming dialogue, but it holds together well enough across 80 minutes.

The crossover logic is sounder than it looks. Alice in Wonderland has always been about a visitor navigating a world of arbitrary rules enforced by an irrational authority. Dropping Santa into that structure works because Santa represents the opposite of arbitrary rule: generosity without condition. The Queen of Hearts who hates Christmas because she never received her gift as a child is not a subtle character, but the emotional logic holds.

The Voice Cast, Ranked by Fit

Gerard Butler as St. Nick is the casting decision the film earns its rating on. Butler brings genuine warmth without sliding into saccharine, and his Scottish accent gives Santa an unexpectedly grounded quality. He sounds like someone who has been doing a hard job for a long time and loves it anyway. That is harder to pull off than it sounds.

Emilia Clarke as the Queen of Hearts is very good at playing imperious and brittle, which is the exact register the character requires. She gets the film's best comedic moments and the climactic emotional turn. Simone Ashley as Alice is the weakest link, not through any failure of performance but because Alice is given less to do than the premise promises. She is the guide and the moral conscience but rarely the driver of events.

Mawaan Rizwan as the Mad Hatter and Asim Chaudhry as the March Hare are exactly what you want from those roles: anarchic, fast-talking, and genuinely funny in short bursts. Mae Muller rounds out the cast, though her role is minor.

The Animation and the Music

Director Peter Baynton previously animated and co-directed The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2023. His approach here is different but intentional. The team used CelAction, rigged 2D animation software originally developed for the Peppa Pig production pipeline. The choice was practical: Kate Hindley's illustrations in the source book are full of fabric patterns, scribbled fur trim, freckles, and elaborate costume details that would have been prohibitively expensive to recreate in traditional frame-by-frame 2D. The CelAction approach preserves the book's illustrated look while making the characters actually movable.

The result is distinctive. The palette is bright and slightly old-fashioned, closer to a 1970s holiday special than to contemporary CGI. It suits the material. The film looks like someone coloured in the picture book and then made it run.

The songs come from Guy Chambers, best known as Robbie Williams' primary collaborator across albums including Life Thru a Lens and Angels, and Amy Wadge, who co-wrote "Thinking Out Loud" with Ed Sheeran, winning the Grammy Award for Song of the Year. That is a legitimately impressive songwriting team for a children's animated film. The songs are catchy, well-constructed, and appropriate to the story. They are not transcendent. None of them will follow you out of the cinema the way a great Disney song does. But they serve the film honestly, and several land better on a second viewing when the lyrics become clearer.

Where It Falls Short

The film is about 10 minutes longer than it needs to be. The third act spends too long on a problem that is already emotionally resolved, and the Queen's transformation, while earned, is handled with less confidence than the setup deserves. The screenplay's commitment to rhyming couplets occasionally produces lines that exist to complete a rhyme rather than advance character or story. You notice it most in the mid-section, when the plot slows and the couplets start to creak.

The story is also quite thin. This is by design, given the picture book source, but expanding a 32-page book to 80 minutes requires either a subplot that adds genuine weight or a very strong comedic engine. The film has neither. It has charm, which carries it most of the way. Children will not notice. Adults sitting through a second or third viewing for the sake of small children might.

None of this is fatal. The film knows what it is, executes it competently, and has genuine visual personality. For a streaming holiday film produced on a reasonable budget, that puts it well above average.