This likable Christmas movie combines feel-good cyberpunk tech, colorful riffs on 18th century dress, energetic dance numbers, and the gruff-man-redeemed-by-child trope into an energetic escapist concoction that hits all the right Christmas notes.
The cast is a likable collection of talented actor/singers, most notably the radiant Madalen Mills as the little girl who eventually becomes the main protagonist.
The dance numbers are wonderful; I particularly liked the antagonist's toy debut and the mail lady's frisky (and failed) seduction. The songs backing them are fine but most didn't strike as as memorable on first lesson, although I did find myself humming Madalen's big "I'm going to do fabulous things" number during the next scene.
Jingle Jangle is fun but not by any means original. Instead it's a bit of a greatest hits collection of tropes from other films, including a cute toy that is pretty blatantly a Wall-E meets E.T. knock-off (to the point that when I saw it in posters I thought, "wait, that's from something else").
It also has an anti-gravity bit that makes no sense even within the world's rather fanciful physics. It's not explained and I just found that really annoying. It's like the movie couldn't decide whether the world was magic or not so it made most of it generally sci-fi-ish but then decided to toss in one thing that was just flat out sorcery. That really bugs me, especially in a movie that really emphasizes science and engineering.
Jingle Jangle is also, like a lot of Christmas fiction, wonderfully calculated. Christmas Carol is a ghost story but also an attempt to change attitudes towards the poor and unchecked capitalism while Rudolph the Reindeer is an adventure that is also a plea for tolerance and acceptance of difference in oneself in others.
In that tradition, Jingle Jangle is a clear attempt to reframe Christmas entertainment away from its overwhelming whiteness. The movie presents a charming pseudo English village where almost everyone is black and middle-class. It offers a little girl who is a hard-core math geek (can a movie like this change the balance of men to women in STEM? We'll find out in a couple of decades). It is a movie that wants to make the world better, which is an honorable goal.
Perhaps that's why the film is so derivative; it doesn't want to rock the boat, it wants to repaint the boat with more colors.
While the movie goes on a bit long and has some sluggish patches and janky elements, overall it's hugely likable. My girlfriend was in a terrible mood when she watched it and said it was one of those rare movies that could make her feel better.
It's not perhaps the *best* Christmas film, but I do think it's effortlessly put itself into the Christmas Classics rotation. You should definitely check it out.
The cast is a likable collection of talented actor/singers, most notably the radiant Madalen Mills as the little girl who eventually becomes the main protagonist.
The dance numbers are wonderful; I particularly liked the antagonist's toy debut and the mail lady's frisky (and failed) seduction. The songs backing them are fine but most didn't strike as as memorable on first lesson, although I did find myself humming Madalen's big "I'm going to do fabulous things" number during the next scene.
Jingle Jangle is fun but not by any means original. Instead it's a bit of a greatest hits collection of tropes from other films, including a cute toy that is pretty blatantly a Wall-E meets E.T. knock-off (to the point that when I saw it in posters I thought, "wait, that's from something else").
It also has an anti-gravity bit that makes no sense even within the world's rather fanciful physics. It's not explained and I just found that really annoying. It's like the movie couldn't decide whether the world was magic or not so it made most of it generally sci-fi-ish but then decided to toss in one thing that was just flat out sorcery. That really bugs me, especially in a movie that really emphasizes science and engineering.
Jingle Jangle is also, like a lot of Christmas fiction, wonderfully calculated. Christmas Carol is a ghost story but also an attempt to change attitudes towards the poor and unchecked capitalism while Rudolph the Reindeer is an adventure that is also a plea for tolerance and acceptance of difference in oneself in others.
In that tradition, Jingle Jangle is a clear attempt to reframe Christmas entertainment away from its overwhelming whiteness. The movie presents a charming pseudo English village where almost everyone is black and middle-class. It offers a little girl who is a hard-core math geek (can a movie like this change the balance of men to women in STEM? We'll find out in a couple of decades). It is a movie that wants to make the world better, which is an honorable goal.
Perhaps that's why the film is so derivative; it doesn't want to rock the boat, it wants to repaint the boat with more colors.
While the movie goes on a bit long and has some sluggish patches and janky elements, overall it's hugely likable. My girlfriend was in a terrible mood when she watched it and said it was one of those rare movies that could make her feel better.
It's not perhaps the *best* Christmas film, but I do think it's effortlessly put itself into the Christmas Classics rotation. You should definitely check it out.