For many people, a familiar pastime in the weeks leading up to major winter holidays is gathering with family members and watching holiday movies, be they in a theater or on television. While vaccines are more widely available now than they were last year, for some plans still remain the same this holiday season, unsure about going to movie theaters. However, this shouldn’t stop us from enjoying holiday movies with friends and family.
During the month of December, therefore, the Falls Free Press will reprise “The 12 Films of Christmas,” focusing on new holiday movies for the year 2021—a year that can still do with plenty of spirit. We will review each film, whether naughty or nice, and let you know where to watch it.
If you had the ability to wish for anything, what would it be? Would it be new electronics? Peace in the community? ALF Pogs? For some families that wish is simply to have enough to eat. For one small robin in Netflix’s Robin Robin, this is her wish.
Adopted from her egg when found by a family of mice collecting food during a storm, Robin (voiced by Bronte Carmichael) adapts to life as a mouse, never having learned to fly, instead attempting to sneak like a mouse in order to collect scraps and crumbs of food from humans’ homes. Granted, Robin isn’t very good at being a sneaky mouse, simply because she isn’t a mouse at all– no matter how she puffs her feathers on top of her head to look like mouse ears. After a disastrous food collection, Robin decides to sneak away from her sleeping family to find the biggest amount of food possible: a sandwich. Instead of finding food, however, she meets and teams up with a magpie who is also unable to fly due to a broken wing.
Magpie tells Robin how she might find food by showing her the decorated Christmas tree in the nearby house. “Once a year, the who-mans take the spikiest tree in the woods, cover it in tin-soil and boo-bells, until their tree is all twinkling and beautiful,” he explains. “Then they put a shiny magic star on top, make a wish, and in the morning, they get anything they want.”
Determined to wish for a feast and prove herself to her mouse family, Robin badly sneaks into the house and retrieves the star, only to encounter the human’s cat (voiced by Gillian Anderson), a creature so vile that it belittles Robin about her entire existence and yearning for more than she has. This concept is realized even more when, after placing the star on the top of Magpie’s tree, the wish doesn’t immediately come true (I completely understand. I also want a magical sandwich). The journey itself helps Robin realize what is truly important in life, which is her mouse family, no matter how much they may own.
Created by artists at Aardman Animations, the studio that created stop-motion clay films Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run, Robin Robin is produced from a different medium– stitched felt. A common Christmas decoration in the UK, writers and directors Mike Please and Dan Ojari brought felt mice holiday decorations to Aardman when presenting the film’s concept. While this is not as widely common of a decorating scene in the United States, the use of felt and yarn makes each character even more warm and fluffy, which is only amplified by each character’s voice. The mice children speak and sound young, and provide what can only be spoonerisms in the dialogue that will make even adults laugh. Meanwhile, at only 30 minutes long, this long journey for Robin is a fun family movie night without staying up too late.
Robin Robin is available to stream on Netflix.
