When the spirit of Christmas seems to have left a small town in Gloucestershire, Jake and Pete must find a way to restore it in time for Christmas.
Review by Julie Sheppard:
Jake & Pete’s Christmas Special is a riotous short that has its own charm, but also freely refers to other stories and people in popular culture. The characters and settings are cleverly created with scrawling pencil crayons. Cutout figures move across the screen as if paper dolls, in a stop-motion way.
The chatter between the main characters is witty and blunt, full of lively and expletive language, much like in the animated show, South Park. They debate common youth topics such as the popularity of certain video games, are also on a quest to rekindle the Christmas spirit. Depictions of real people such as Joe Wicks, Rachel Zegler, and Keanu Reeves and a showing of Prince Harry’s recent book Spare, are all done in a cheeky, entertaining way.
A Christmas film would not be complete without jingle bells aplenty, and this soundtrack does not disappoint, making the gritty language and characterizations all the more edgy in comparison. The young gravelly voices of the characters give this piece the feeling that the kids are just having fun, using their imaginations and a stream of consciousness, as the tale gets more and more zany. The demise of an evil Frosty-type character and the lead female are shown as mangled pencil crayon drawings, as Santa lists off his favourite things – a list of hard drugs.
Although the rather rough pencil lines give the piece a child-like feel, this project ends up touching on a wide variety of serious adult issues such as economics and politics and makes use of a cornucopia of modern popular icons to address them.
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