Richard Curtis continues his relationship with the holiday season with this new release. That Christmas (2024) is a new Netflix film following in the footsteps of past Christmas animated films, with the most successful being Klaus (2019) which went on to receive Oscar nominations. Something tells me that this one will not be following in those footsteps.
Anyone who has been reading my reviews for a while knows I have a pretty poor relationship with Netflix original films. There are a couple that sneak through and succeed, Klaus being one of them, but for the most part they just don’t hit home with me a good amount of the time. That Christmas is not a terrible film, especially for Netflix standards, but does continue the trend of films released by the streaming service that do nothing for me. Admittedly, this film is very much aimed at young children and families, so I am absolutely not the target audience, but at the same time there are several films made for families that I very much enjoy. On a positive note, the animation in this film is pretty decent and can be fun at times. The voice acting is also pretty solid across the board, so from a technical and performance standpoint I have no issues. The film really just fails in its narrative. It takes the road of having a few small narrative threads running concurrently and then coming together towards the end. But none of these stories really grabbed my attention or really had enough time to truly develop into anything all that meaningful, and the coming together at the end feels a little weak and unearned. There are a couple that had potential, on then one that is just a bit of nothing, and because of that third one the other two fall a little to the wayside. But as I say, this is not a film aimed at me and while I think there are many better family-oriented films based around Christmas, if you have smaller children and you were looking for a new film to sit down and watch this holiday season this one could do the job.
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