The Snowman
The Snowman has been a staple of my Christmas viewing regimen for as long as I can remember, and although both the animated short and Raymond Briggs’ book have reached the status of holiday classic by now, I’ve always felt that my love of it was symptomatic of a latent but deeply entrenched outsider complex. I have a vivid memory from first grade, on the last day before winter break, when the teacher asked us to bring in our favorite Christmas movies for the class holiday party. My submission of The Snowman was immediately mocked out of consideration by my peers, and not even its unadorned blue VHS box was spared. The reason behind the ridicule was simple and cruel: There are no catchy musical numbers in The Snowman, no princesses or talking animals, no fart jokes, barely any words—and the fact that I thought that was how we should spend our free half-day was obviously evidence that I was boring and dumb, and I liked boring, dumb things.
While at the time the incident sent my 7-year-old self into inconsolable tears, in retrospect, I understand why The Snowman isn’t exactly a party movie. Even without its conventionally tragic ending (Spoiler alert: snowmen melt), The Snowman is kind of a downer, more than a little lonely and desolate next to the season’s more raucous fare. Christmas tales are supposed to be big and warm and a little silly, just like the holiday itself, brimming over with bickering-yet-loving family members and hilarious turkey disasters. But as the only child of a single parent with an extended family that wasn’t exactly big on reunions, this was never the way I experienced Christmas. Perhaps this was the reason that the bigger TV spectaculars of the holidays never really resonated with me. But every December to this day, I still find myself wanting to return to The Snowman, to go back to that little English house surrounded by miles and miles of snowy wilderness, and go flying over the North Sea into the Aurora Borealis.
The story is very simple: Boy builds snowman; boy and snowman have an adventure; boy loses snowman. There have been several introductions for the film throughout the years for its various airings on British and American television (including a weirdly disingenuous one with David Bowie), but the one that I grew up with, the one that is burned in my memory as an artifact of the winters of my childhood, is the original opening with Raymond Briggs himself. In a single, stationary shot (the only live-action shot in the film), the author walks across a clearing toward a thicket of barren trees at twilight, silent except for the soft wind and the plaintive cry of a lone crow. As his figure grows smaller in the distance, Briggs’ strangely affecting voiceover begins:
I remember that winter because it brought the heaviest snow I’d ever seen. Snow had fallen steadily all night long, and in the morning, I awoke in a room filled 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.