Bah, Humduck!: A Looney Tunes Christmas

“A Christmas Carol”, over and over again.

I've lost count of the versions, adaptations, rereadings and reconstructions I've seen of Charles Dickens's “A Christmas Carol”. I've heard it said that, with this tale, Dickens invented Christmas. I am not able to go that far, but I recognize that the tale changed the way we face this season: instead of being just a religious festival, it became a family celebration, much more secular and almost returning to its pagan roots. This is just another movie based on the tale.

For that reason, I won't waste my time talking about the script, we know how it ends. And perhaps because of this condition, I felt that this film lacks an additional dose of irreverence and humor, which tends to be more evident whenever the Looney Tunes are called. Here, the humor is essentially based on the amount of aggression, slaps and deformations that poor Daffy Duck can withstand for forty-five minutes. This ends up tiring after a while. I also felt that Bugs Bunny is lefting in the film, he acts almost like a “jiminy cricket”, a voice of conscience, and not like a plot character.

The film is technically very good and features several well-known voices for those familiar with the Tunes. Joe Alasky and Bob Bergen are especially good, however they are masters of the task at hand and I doubt this film was too challenging for them. Visually, the film is very elegant. I don't know if it was made using digital animation, I believe so, but the truth is that it seems to respect the aesthetics and traditional appearance of the dolls we grew up with.