Me and my gf wanted to over-intergrate the Christmas spirit this year to compensate for the otherwise dispiriting year. We decided to watch this show alongside Skomakergaten.
It started off with a lot of clichés and felt somewhat rigid in both acting and story development, but at one point there was a certain change where it felt like things loosened up and genuine creativity was expressed. Might just be projection as I became more familiar with the show, but it also felt like the acting became more engaging and had a personal expression instead of rereading of a script.
I felt like the main message trying to be communicated is the unbalanced overreliance on scientific thinking, and a encouragement to look at stories and folklore when science is not sufficient. I do agree that this is an important imbalance to point out, but I do feel like it became a too obvious point, like it was actively trying to change the viewers from one perspective another. I wonder if I would have enjoyed it more if there was only a finger pointing out the problem without giving any solutions, but I'm sure the show wouldn't had gotten any funding then. So I don't really feel like the creative spark and beauty lies in the overall or core idea of the show, but rather in its tangents scenes. Like the school play rehearsed and performed within the show I was openly and creatively engaged by, maybe cus it was not too reliant on being consistent with the rest of the story. It might had been better actually if the show had more of this sort of scenes that we're not so much directly correlated to the main story development, but that might be weird for a julekalender. This also accounts for the asocial autistic teacher that felt like novel exploring and became very funny.
One aspects of the show that was charming was the sharing and passing on of hope. As one character attained hope from inspiration, the other lost it, and on the journey they go a bit back and forth on this front. This sort of keeping the flame alive game I felt was very fitting, as this year has been disheartening for a lot of people. This idea of actively keeping and seeking hope is also heard in the theme song, which both me and my gf found very beautiful.
This show was quite engaging and funny, at least after a couple of episodes in. Might be most appropriate for old kids and not too enjoyable for the youngest ones and maybe it should also had has more complex patterns for adults to chew on, like Pixar is very good at achieving while still being kids friendly. A lot of good creativity here.
