My mom sent me back to Japan with one of those Double Feature DVD boxes featuring Christmas movies:
Miracle in Toyland starts with a long sequence of a military group, under fire by an unseen enemy, leaping, rolling, and cavorting behind enemy lines in a variety of mountain locations. The group of characters is as varied and diverse as, say, the old GI Joe cartoons, with each one displaying distinct characteristics. One of the characters dies in an explosion. Ghosts of fallen soldiers are seen. This goes on for nearly 10 minutes, but turns out to be a dream sequence with no connection to anything which follows. The boy who had the dream is the son of a military guy who is never home. The father goes on a mission over Christmas, so the son will be alone. The son’s indistinctly ethnic friend, Gabriela, swoops in to save the son by taking him to Toyland, a toy store which has a full sized race track inside of it. By winning the race at the toy store, the son alienates Gabriela, who didn’t want to go fast. All the toys come to life and take the son on a big adventure through many different trope-riddled locations. The son realizes he’s a jerk, and apologizes to Gabriela, but then the military shows up to state that the father’s plane has gone down. The toys show up to take the son to the father. All the while somehow remaining invisible to the father, the toys and the son cooperate to rescue the father.
I have never seen anything this incoherent before, save maybe The Da Vinci Code.
A Little Christmas Magic, anticlimactically, was a fairly standard Bernstein Bears style story, with anthropomorphized animal families living in harmony in a mixed-species town. There’s a storm, children are lost in the storm, so the parents go to find them. The only really funny bit is that when the kids apologize for ruining Christmas by running off, the parents reply, “Oh, you don’t need presents and decorations and cakes to celebrate Christmas! All you need is friends and family!” and then, POOF, they’re all back home with presents, decorations, and cakes as well as each other, enjoying the best Christmas, but ultimately betraying the message they’d just tried to make.
