Purely Joyful Movie!

Am I Missing Something?

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

This cynical cash in animation short basically retells the story of Elf, the Will Ferrell film without any of the charm and many of the cast from the original film.Ed Asner does reprise his role to voice Santa who tells the grown up Buddy who thinks he is an Elf in the North Pole that he is actually human who stowed away in Santa's bag as a baby.His real dad is Walter Hobbs living in New York who has been on the naughty list for years.Buddy travels to see his father who works at a publishing company with a horrid boss. Walter is taken aback at first to see this grown up infant but Buddy's relentless cheer transforms him and when Santa comes to deliver presents the curmudgeonly Walter gets the festive fever.Because this is labelled as a musical we have to put up with some mind numbingly dull songs. Even the animation is not much to shout home about.It would be just be better to put the Ferrell film on.

OK, at least they had the guy who played Santa in the Elf movie on this and it is supposed to be stop motion (Santa Claus Is Coming to Town) But this is horrible, I saw the trailer on Youtube and got curious so I went to my local Target and bought the DVDI couldn't get over the fact Jim Parson was in it (no offense to the actor) But his voice is annoying, This is worse than the Spongebob Christmas and at least that was interesting. Yes I do understand there are worst specials but this was the straw that broke the camels back. I'm sorry but the elves look freaky as hell, the person who voiced Walter Hobbs hurt me, I mean the guy gave me the heebie geebies And why do all the humans look like smurfs? I'm sorry but I do not like this specialThe plot is basically like the movie where Buddy was raised by elves and doesn't find out he is a human until he grows up and Santa tells him about his birth fatherI love Elf the 2003 live action movie and I am going to stick to that1/10

Let me start this review by saying that i am not familiar with the Will Ferrell movie, so I cannot say which is better and which is worse. However, I did not really like this 45 minute special from last Christmas. The voice cast has some pretty big names, including multiple Emmy Award winner Jim Parsons as the lead character. He unites with his former "Big Bang Theory" co star Kate Micucci. The whole premise is about an elf getting his dad off the naughty list. As you probably already guessed from the title, there are quite a few musical numbers in here, but none of these really wowed me. The last one sung by the female main character was solid, the rest fairly forgettable.All in all, this movie had no less than a total of 6 pretty experienced writers and directors and taking this into account it is a fairly disappointing result. The animation isn't great either. There are parts of it which are downright bad, like the mouth of the villain. The topics such as the elf falling in love or relationship with his dad offered room for nice emotion, but it fell short in this area too. And the ending with all the people from the naughty list suddenly showing up was strange too. Fairly forgettable Christmas special here, really only for small children.

I had very low expectations for this... thing. It still couldn't meet them. The first song went completely against the moral of the original Elf (2003). Santa sings about how he wishes the elves would stop singing. That's completely against the whole meaning of Elf! There truly was nothing good about this movie. The actors did okay with the bottom of the barrel writing they were given, except for Mark Hamill, who sounded like a robot, reading his lines with no life, no personality. The only reason I didn't give it a 1 is because Edward Asner actually did a very good job as Santa, who was the narrator. Once again, this good performance was ruined by awful writing. The worst part about this sorry excuse for a TV movie though, is that it ruined the story that formed a Christmas classic, Elf. The final scene might have earned itself a third star, if it weren't for Buddy being very annoying. He actually managed to be even more annoying than he had been all movie long. But to sum it all up, this thing had the cheesiest lines and songs that I've ever heard in a movie. Do yourself a favor and, if you taped it, or it's on again, don't watch this. Sit down on the couch, and watch the original Elf. That can actually be considered a movie. This remake is pure junk.