Review Essay
Friends, it’s Christmas Eve, and your taking the time to be here is such a generous gift—I hope you know how much it means to me that you read these things I write, and I hope that what I find to say adds in some measure to your enjoyment of film as a medium, of these films in particular, or of the holidays that provide the context for the works I choose to share. My hope on Christmas Eve is to share something really meaningful with you—a film that rewards you for your gift of time. Last year, of course, it was a movie I’ve loved since childhood: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. This year, though the work itself is very different—a nearly wordless 30 minute short film—the reasons behind it are in some ways very similar. I was enchanted by Dianne Jackson’s The Snowman the very first time I ever saw it, long ago, as a child, and it haunts me beautifully still.
If you do not know The Snowman, it will be a simple thing to describe it to you: the film’s power is in its simplicity. Based on a wordless picture book by celebrated British children’s author and illustrator, Raymond Briggs, The Snowman tells the story of a child named James (whose name we only know from a gift tag glimpsed for a second or two, and yes, I’ll accept, we may have found one reason this work sticks with me in particular) who wakes on a snowy morning in a small village somewhere in Great Britain near Brighton (in East Sussex). His response is that of almost any child to fresh snowfall: he goes out to play immediately, and fills his day with snowy escapades. The magic of the film, though, occurs that evening, when at midnight the snowman he constructed comes to life, and James engages in some playful hijinks with his new friend, before a truly breathtaking sequence that involves a visit to the North Pole and a return home again. It’s the story of one precious day, half down-to-earth and half fantastic. It is an annual television tradition in the United Kingdom, as cherished there as the TV specials American children grew up with in the late 20th Century. And it’s a tradition I would love to encourage you to begin for yourself.
The magic of this film begins for me the moment it opens. In the only live action sequence, we see a man walking away from us on a gray winter day—he is outdoors somewhere, and headed for the woods. As he walks, we hear a voiceover performed by the author and illustrator, Raymond Briggs, who plays the role of the older James reminiscing about the past. Literally the only words of dialogue in the film are his: “I remember that winter because it brought the heaviest snow that I had ever seen. The snow had fallen steadily all night long, and in the morning I awoke in a room full with light and silence. The whole world seemed to be held in a dreamlike stillness. It was a magical day, and it was on that day I made the snowman.” There is something absolutely captivating to me about every single sentence—the childhood memory of snow. A room full with light and silence. The dreamlike stillness of the earth just after a snowfall, and the thrilling restraint of simply saying that this was the day he made “the snowman”. He needs to say nothing else to us. All will unfold. And then the woods are transformed into lush, evocative animation, an owl swoops through our field of vision, and a piano starts taking us up and down in rolling arpeggios and a string section fills in behind, and we’re soaring over this moving terrain beneath us, all the way to a rural house and a boy in his second story room.
In a wordless film, of course, the music matters so much, and Howard Blake’s score is tremendously successful—sprightly when the boy’s at play in the snow, silly when the snowman first starts to make a bit of chaos inside the boy’s home, but stirring at key moments that make my heart race. The piano theme that plays behind that opening animated sequence (a theme that returns later in the film) is, for reasons I cannot explain, an absolutely core memory for me. The moment I hear it, I’m transported. Maybe it’s the wordlessness of The Snowman that gripped me so much as a child: I am given the initial framing of the memorable day, but after that, it’s just the kind of experience that’s almost universal to anyone in a latitude where snow is possible. The loose, friendly oversight of a parent who wants you to dress a little more warmly. The snow lying before you like an untouched canvas, and the joy of looking behind yourself to see your traces in the drifts. The odds-and-ends solution for the making of a snowman, which involves a borrowed hat and scarf, a handful of bits of coal, and a satsuma orange for a big, friendly nose.
The play with the snowman, once he wakes up, is maybe the least gripping part of the film for me: I am amused by what unfolds initially, with a polite snowman trying to get comfortable in a house full of distractions and things to explore. Maybe my favorite sequences are the snowman trying out different fruits as noses, seemingly mostly for the boy’s amusement, and the snowman trying on a mishmash of mom and dad’s clothes in their closet, like a small toddler who’s having fun with a look hardly anyone else would think to wear. I get slightly impatient with their ill-advised motorcycle journey, though we do get to take in a little more of the countryside in pursuit of the duo on their bike, tracking which parts of the woods (and therefore which animals) they’ve disrupted that evening.
The moment that is absolutely fixed in my imagination, though, follows all this, and while I hesitate to spoil it for you, I also can’t talk about The Snowman and not talk about this. Without explanation, and with no apparent need to even prepare the boy beside him, the Snowman simply steps out into the yard and up into the sky, where he extends his arms forward and begins to glide freely, with James beside him holding his hand. As they take flight, we see the English village spiraling below: slowly they soar up to heights where we see the patterns of the hedgerows and the distant steeple of the parish church, etc., and suddenly we hear the only other words we’ll hear in the film, as a boy soprano begins to sing “Walking in the Air”. I have no way of explaining why it strikes me the way it does, but friends, even thinking about it gives me goose bumps. The music feels ethereal, otherworldly, like some kind of song the stars have been singing all along and the boy hadn’t heard it before, but of course it’s also not anyone’s song at all but his, given the simplicity of the lyrics. The song merely describes, in a loving but not lavish way, the feeling of being in the air, soaring above the world that humans know, kept safe by the presence of this guardian beside him. The words are barely even poetry, they’re so direct—the most metaphorical moment is when the boy sings, “the villages go by like dreams,” and they really do, the animation throughout this sequence is fluid and captivating as we are carried through “the midnight blue” on our way to the North Pole. The experience of all this, though, is transformative: the film is conveying something I can only barely articulate. I am caught in its spell every time I see it, and whenever I’m watching it, I’m not a day older than I was the first time I saw it. I have no idea what it’s doing to me, but I show up and I let it wash over me all the same.
I’ll hold off on describing the final segments of The Snowman, to ensure I haven’t spoiled every last minute of it. As I mentioned earlier, a visit to Santa at the North Pole is a part of James’s night with the snowman, but even that doesn’t really go the way that I would normally expect it to (and Santa is drawn and depicted in a way that’s a little unexpected to me). And the return home brings with it some unexpected uncertainty….what will happen now? Will the snowman stay or go; remain whole or crumble? What does the boy want, or need? And all I will say about the final moments of the film is that, to me, they’re perfect. They capture that balance of melancholy and delight that I get from the rest of this peculiarly potent short film—a sense that in childhood there are things to be learned, about joy and about grief, lessons that we then spend a lifetime unpacking. Perhaps, if we are fortunate, after a long time those lessons become something we can set down in words. As Raymond Briggs was wise enough to know (and as Dianne Jackson, the animator, was smart enough not to alter), initially these understandings are not things we can put into words at all. They are meant to be set down, at least at first, as symbols—the wings of an owl and the feet of a fox. The splash of the sea and the checkerboard patterns of the partitioned fields. The blue blur of the midnight sky and the tumbling of light and dark, looking down as we soar. The tracks our feet leave in the freshly fallen snow, traces left to a world that will erase them by taking them into itself, leaving no presence but memory.
I Know That Voice: There are only two voices we hear in this hauntingly lovely and otherwise wordless tone poem of a short film—the gruff, lyrical voice of Raymond Briggs, briefly playing the role of “older James”, and then the angelic, clear singing voice of the boy soprano, Peter Auty, who performs the piece, “Walking in the Air,” that accompanies the first rush of flight. (You may know the name Aled Jones in connection with the piece instead…the reason is that, by the time this film became well known and the producers realized they could release a single version of the song on the radio, Peter’s voice had dropped and Aled performed the new version in his place. If you know “Walking in the Air” from the radio, you’ve heard that version instead.)
In any case, with only two names to choose from, it’s delightful that I can connect both men to holiday media. Raymond had, early in his career, illustrated a book I’d love to own someday, 1968’s The Christmas Book, a compilation by James Reeves that’s available at the Internet Archive. Raymond also created two books about Father Christmas that were turned into the TV short film Father Christmas in 1991. Peter, on the other hand, remains not just an extraordinarily talented professional singer but a man who will from time to time show up on television in Christmas contexts, almost certainly because of his connection to this staple of the British holiday season. Over the last 25 years, he’s appeared as himself in I Love Christmas, Best Ever Christmas Films, Britain’s Favourite Christmas Songs, Greatest Ever Christmas Movies (in this one, he is listed in the credits, amusingly, as “Quite Clearly Not Aled Jones”), and lastly in 2022’s The Snowman: The Film That Changed Christmas, a TV special about this beautiful short film (I think it’s amusing that the TV special is 15 minutes longer than the film it’s based on).
That Takes Me Back: It’s funny, the little things that take you back. The front room in James’s house in Brighton has a crackling fireplace, and an old television that’s fuzzy when you turn it on—I may never again live in a home with a fireplace and I certainly doubt I’ll own a cathode ray tube television again, so both of these features just take me back to being young. But I think also the simplicity and wonder of this story work their magic on me: there are other films I remember seeing more often as a child, but none of them make me feel more like a child than this film. I hear Raymond’s aging voice and the piano starts to play and I don’t know where I am, but I’m not in my chair anymore. I can feel how thin the veil is, I guess, that divides the now from what was, and maybe also from what will be, as my age increasingly nears Raymond’s when he narrated the introduction. This film never fails to take me back.
I Understood That Reference: Santa Claus is, of course, an important presence here, but strangely he may be the least magical element in the story, to some extent, appearing largely as a friendly domestic figure offering hospitality.
Holiday Vibes (5/10): In such a short film, I’m trying to grade on the curve: we have Santa Claus (and what is surely in some sense a Christmas party), there’s a gift given, and at one point we see the family Christmas tree. On the other hand, this film is really about a “magical day” unconnected with Christmas or so I’d argue. The wintry landscape and classical boy soprano are sure things we often connect to the holidays. In the end, I think this belongs somewhere in the middle, but I struggled to settle on a number.
Actual Quality (10/10): I couldn’t tell you a single thing I want improved in this film, other than that I want to be flying with that snowman while “Walking in the Air” plays for maybe a thousand years without stopping. I could sit in whatever that emotional space is, basically forever. There are other movies, obviously, that do more and say more, with a longer running time and a lot more words. But The Snowman….there’s just nothing like it, for me. It is a singular viewing experience and one that transports me emotionally. It earns that 10/10, in my book.
Party Mood-Setter? This taps so deeply into my brain that it would be very hard for me to imagine ignoring it, myself, but honestly I bet it works that way really well for some folks. The music is lovely but not obtrusive (other than our boy soprano, whose voice is I think totally arresting), and with no dialogue, it would be very easy to let it play even on a loop behind some gathering (or while you’re focusing on hanging ornaments on the tree, etc.), I imagine.
Plucked Heart Strings? Something happens in this story that I cannot explain. There is a numinous quality to the whole experience, despite so much of it being silly, wacky childhood antics. The magic of the day, the snowfall, the impossible man and his impossible flight, all add up to give me the eerie feeling that I am on the verge of understanding something important and that it is almost certainly something important about myself. I can’t possibly say if it works that way for everybody, but for me, this film will always stir emotions.
Recommended Frequency: It’s so brief and so beautiful. Who among us couldn’t find a half hour free to immerse ourselves in this experience once a year? I know it’s Christmas Eve, but I bet that, if you sit down tonight at the end of whatever your day is, and leave the lights slightly dim as you watch, this would give you more or less the perfect mood calibration for a holiday tomorrow (for those of you celebrating on Christmas Day, of course). But I’ll add, this is not just a “Christmas” film and in fact, as I note above, I think there’s a lot about it that connects more generally with the feeling of winter in the northern latitudes, its mystery and its wonder. If you’re someone who observes the solstice, or Yule, or any other festival of light and dark here at one of the extremes of the calendar, my guess is this would suit you just as well.
You really ought to watch this film, and I have to tell you, the only way I know how to do that is to watch it on Hoopla, a free service that most public libraries in the United States seem to offer, which allows you to stream some more obscure movies (like this one!). Go to your local library and see if they link to Hoopla as a resource: if so, you can search for The Snowman there, and stream it (within the limits of your particular library’s contract—some of them cap individuals at a certain number of checkouts a month, or sometimes the whole system has a daily cap that resets at midnight). You can always pick it up on DVD, though: it’s literally $7 at Barnes and Noble, which is a steal of a price, and for free there appear to be hundreds and hundreds of libraries that will check out the disc to you, or so saith Worldcat. NOTE: A friend reports that the film was available for her on Pluto’s streaming service, so you may have luck finding it places I didn’t think it appeared?
Friends, what a privilege and a joy it’s been to walk with you through these holidays again: I hope it remains interesting to see what films I come up with, and what I have to say about both old classics and movies you’ve never heard of in your life. I seem addicted to this particular kind of work, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that I’m back at it again in 2026—drop by here in November to see what I’ve decided to go with, and in the meanwhile, I hope you catch up with a couple of the movies I’ve talked about here that you didn’t get around to yet. Winter’s long, and most of these tales go well with a little snow on the ground (or at least a little dream of snow in our hearts).
