Monday, December 23, 2019

Olive the Other Reindeer - 'Toon Reviews Shorty

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When it comes to Christmas specials, some are major classics known for decades, while others aren’t nearly as widely seen or known.  It’s easy to get to the iconic ones and even say your thoughts on them, but depending on your tastes in animation, you’d be inclined to dig deeper to see what else is out there.  In the case of today’s featured Christmas special, it’s one that’s somewhat unknown to modern audiences, but one I have some sort of connection with.  It’s a special I saw back when it was relatively new in the early 2000s, and later made a goal to see every year along with other favorite Christmas specials. With this MC Toon Reviews Shorty, maybe sharing it with you will entice you to check it out as well.  This is:



Olive the Other Reindeer

(December 17, 1999)

Back in the day, this Christmas special was not necessarily shown prominently, but its presence was known across quite a few networks.  Then as the 2010s began, it slowly started to fade from the airways, and nowadays, it’s pretty much gone completely.  As I have become attached to it during the original time of its airing, I can personally recount the greatness this special has to offer.  It especially helps that it has one of the most imaginative ideas for a story, Christmas-themed or otherwise.

The premise of this tale is that a dog named Olive gets the idea that she’s actually meant to be a reindeer who helps pull Santa Claus’ sleigh.  During a radio broadcast where Santa considers skipping the annual Christmas Eve flight when one of his reindeer, Blitzen, becomes injured, he brings up ‘all of the other reindeer.’  With ‘all of’ sounding like ‘Olive,’ this becomes her motivation to do what she can to save Christmas for the world.  This right here is the bulk of the cleverness to the special with a big adventure stemming from something as simple as a mishearing.  Working in the special’s favor is that there’s more to the setup than that to make it stand as something truly appealing.  A strong example of this is in the major variety in the cast of characters.  Olive herself is a typical nice protagonist for the whole show which doesn’t make her all that interesting, but she still comes off as a very likable lead.  For one thing, there’s a sweet appeal in her voice work provided by Drew Barrymore whose cadence sells the character’s good nature and Christmas cheer.  There’s also believable weight to how her portrayal drives her ambitions for the story.  Going around and being friendly to the people of her town, you can’t help but notice that she stands out from other dogs.  It’s not that she talks considering that all animals talk in this special’s universe.  It’s an anomaly the she behaves more like a civil human being, has a flea for a pet, and doesn’t do any reckless dog things like tear up flowerbeds or chase things.  All this comes to a head when her master Tim flat out admonishes the fact that she doesn’t really act like a dog.  Even if she clearly is a dog biologically, so much established about her usual behavior is solid motivation to go to action when Santa needs help.  In fact, going along with a scenario so crazy as believing a flightless dog can help pull a sleigh blends well into what happens throughout the special. By this, a lot of characters achieving their wildest goals through trying their best out of inspiration from Olive’s adventure.

This steers us to the third big point that works in favor of Olive’s character, and it’s all about the various characters she works off of on her way to the North Pole.  From all the featured characters is the bulk of the imagination. Each character continuously breaths fresh life into the story, and make for entertaining personality clashes from a nice, friendly protagonist like Olive.  Her main sidekick on her way to the North Pole is a penguin called Martini who practically steals the show.  His gimmick is that he’s a smart talking penguin always looking for short cuts to riches, even as they resort to completely unethical means like selling counterfeit watches.  Add in a wisecracking, smart-talking voice and a few witty one liners, and he’s all set to entertain.  Balancing out Martini’s edginess is how he proves to be a genuinely good friend to Olive.  At first he just has her benefit him in some way, but knows when it’s fair to do his part to help her along in her mission, and he’s very competent with assistance too.  It’s because of Martini Olive overcomes a lot of obstacles, even gets in to see Santa, and even pulls off the Christmas Eve flight well.  As you can see, Martini is a fun animated personality for the special, but he’s not the only standout character here.  There’s the main source of Olive’s mishearing from her pet flea, Fido, making for a pretty cute sibling-like bond.  Also, a dog having a flea for a pet kind of brings things full circle.  The people Olive meets on her trip also have many individual charms as well.  There’s an insightful sequence in a bar where patrons such as a flightless reindeer called Schnitzel and his bartender partner Round John Virgin show complexities as characters.  They at first don’t take Olive’s mission seriously and bully her and Martini around, but when Olive calls everyone out and claims she’s only trying to save Christmas, they back off.  It’s this instance that shows for how jerky they seem, people like these bar patrons do have hearts and are capable of human emotions and simple desires.  While Olive and Martini make for an entertaining duo, time spent on the bus to the North Pole has them backed up more by the driver of the bus, Richard Stands.  He may be an average person, but there’s something witty about his lines and random recounts of past drives.  By the way, names like Richard Stands and Round Jon Virgin certainly do their part to perpetuate the special’s theme of mishearing things as something else.

Then there’s the villain of the story, a postman who’s desperate to ruin Christmas for everyone, using the news of Santa not being able to fly with one less reindeer as a start.  While it may seem like a random choice for a villain, it ends up working very well.  Postmen are often viewed as the biggest enemy of dogs, but being different from most of her kind, Olive is an enemy to this postmen for different reasons.  His motivations are also understandable and even relatable to people working during the holiday rush.  He tells of how his job is easy in the summer, but as the weather gets colder and people start sending heavy gifts, it always becomes too stressful for him to manage.  There’s truth to what drives the postman to hate Christmas, but the special agrees that his feelings are no excuse to ruin the holiday for everyone else.  This way, you can get where the postman is coming from, but also want him to be stopped all at once. 
As for how Olive relates to this, since she’s going to the North Pole to act as a reindeer to save Santa’s flight, this makes her the postman’s biggest target.  Really, anyone in her position probably would be regardless if they’re a dog or not.  With the postman, there are a multitude of plots to stop Christmas from being saved.  He comes up with fabricated reasons to get Olive accused of fraud, tricks her friends with disguises, rams cars off the road to get to her bus, and forges mean letters for Santa.  These plans can really get destructive and just plain relentless, making the postman’s hatred of Christmas a sad sight, but also humorously over-the-top.  Even when Olive ultimately makes it to the North Pole despite everything, and helps the sleigh fly just by moving her arms and legs fast enough, the postman is still at it.  When no one sees him, he swaps Santa’s toy sack with a sack of junk mail, leaving Santa without anything of substance to deliver.  This is done to put Olive’s dog traits to good use as her sense of smell on the mail helps the sleigh team track the postman down.  This in turn leads to a well-staged climax with grand-scale music and action happening all at once to give the special even more weight.  Martini also gets a big hero moment out of this as his use of a jack-in-the-box to frighten the postman while he’s driving causes him to crash and help Santa retrieve his toys.  In fact, it inspires a solid conclusion for Martini as he later decides to turn over a new honest leaf as a postman while the actual postman is left as a penguin.  At least a scene in an ending montage shows he’ll be happier as he receives a genuine gift of fish from other penguins.  There’s a lot to the postman’s role that give him good appeal as an antagonist, a relatable working man during the Christmas season, and as a member of this cast.

A lot of this special’s appeal comes from its imaginative premise and characters with their own brand of personality and charm. However, it’s the elements from the technical side of things that give it an identity all its own as well as its personal brand of greatness.  For one thing, it has some of the strongest humor I have ever seen in a Christmas special, which makes sense when you have the crew of The Simpsons running the show.  It follows the main theme of mishearing things for something else not just in what drives the plot, but also in certain names.  That said, it works so good humorously that it falls flat when used for more dramatic moments.  For example, the thing that drives Olive to try and save Christmas is a belief that Tim has told her that he’s replacing her with a new dog as it follows his berating.  This is all thanks to Fido who’s the real one who misheard the radio announcement that started it all.  The problem is that it’s perfectly clear that Tim did not say what they think as the audience hears the more sincere truth in the form of his apology.  In other words, Olive really has no real push to do what she does, and it would have been better if she left before Tim appeared.  Working in the story’s favor is that the tone is mostly light-hearted and focused on humor, so the nonexistent drama of Olive thinking she’s being replaced isn’t explored.  Usually that’s a problem, but here, it’s the best way for the story to go.  Almost everything is in the name of fun with even more clever bits of humor from character lines, fanciful settings given unusual portrayals, and fourth wall breaks.  The cleverest of which comes from a scene where the postman locks Olive in his truck, and she escapes with a file in a convenient package addressed to her.  The joke is that it says it came from deus ex machina, a convention that defines itself by putting in an element that exists only for one sole moment, and that isn’t always believable.  Like with how it handles the weak drama, the comedy is what makes this potential problem work.

Another standout technical element is the art style.  Some animation fans may know how computer animation is starting to become more stylized these days in films like Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse and Klaus.  Oddly enough, the visual style for this special shows that there were attempts to make computer animation more stylized long before that, when it was still new too.  When looking at the style, you may think it’s animated to traditional 2D way, at least with the characters.  The backgrounds on the other hand have noticeable more depth and volume suggesting computer animation.  So how is it that the characters fit in even if they aren’t computer animated as well?  As it turns out, despite not looking it, the characters are computer animated.  However, instead of fully 3-dimensional models, they’re flat polygons that move and emote according to the story beats, and the special is shot to not expose any flatness in appearance.  That’s a clever way of showing that computer animation is capable of more than most may think, though it makes sense that only this special has this kind of appearance.  Sometimes the characters look unnatural, it’s not always convincing that characters are sad or mad, and some designs are really off, especially Richard Stands.  Making these shortcomings work is not just the performances, writing, and at times humorous styles of the characters.  It also does a good job of making the illustrations from the book this special is based on by J Otto Seibold and Vivian Walsh come to life.  For how flat the characters are, it is no doubt faithful to the source and gives the feel of watching a moving picture book.  That’s pretty much the best favor for the animation, but it’s still nonetheless an interesting thing with the type of it that now dominates.  I’d certainly take it over photo realism any day.

Like most great animated films, the music is what propels the special to something memorable.  In addition to moving orchestral pieces, there are also a good selection of memorable songs to help tell the story.  Each one is upbeat, immersive in Christmas spirit, and all around a feel-good musical work.  Some exist to establish the Christmas setting and tone, like Olive’s song that opens and closes the special.  Others tell a lot about the characters. “Christmas Bah Bug and Hum” is an energetic anti-Christmas song from the postman that brilliantly defines his character and relates to the extra work the holiday brings people.  Among the more soulful numbers in the special is “We’re Not So Bad”.  Just after Schnitzel, Round John, and the other characters in the bar bully Olive around and she calls them out, they let her know that this behavior is not the real them.  They prove they can be friendly and decent people, but the problems of the North Pole society as well as the possibility of Christmas not coming seem to get to them.  Plus, from Schnitzel’s singing, the whole truth of the matter is from the heart, genuine, and never feels phony.  After this comes the climax of difficulties getting in, Olive getting the strength to fly with the reindeer, and that intense encounter with the postman in the name of toys.  Music once again comes into play with the ever awesome, “Merry Christmas After All” a rocking song that’s the special at its most inspirational and will forever ring in your head.  The best forms of media would not be as memorable as they are without great music, and I say Olive the Other Reindeer is no exception.

It’s sad that this special doesn’t get aired these days, because I say it has the makings of something worth viewing traditionally.  The characters are great, the story is imaginative, it’s elevated by smart comedy and amazing music, and even the cheap visuals have their own appeal.  Should there be a chance to check out Olive the Other Reindeer, take it, and I guarantee you won’t be disappointed, for it’s a hidden gem of Christmas spirit.  Some may feel it’s a special that’s rightfully obscure and forgotten, but like Olive herself, it just might be more than it seems, so Merry Christmas after all.
Highly Recommended
 
Stay Animated Folks,
And Merry CHRISTMAS!

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