David Lowery On the Melancholic Mood of ‘An Almost Christmas Story’

David Lowery’s An Almost Christmas Story is a magical experience. His foray into stop-motion animation encapsulates that feeling when you get in from the snow and yank your boots off. Your fingers and toes are still cold, but you are warmed by the colorful holiday lights. An Almost Christmas Story challenges our traditional notions of what a holiday film really is as we examine the true meaning of family.

Writer Jack Thorne is no stranger to the realm of mischief and wonder. He penned the Tony Award-winning sensation, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, as well as the upcoming Tron: Ares. This short centers on Moon, a young owl who is separated from his family before finding himself in the most famous Christmas tree in the world: the tree in New York City’s Rockefeller Center. Lowery reveals that not much changed from Thorne’s original words.

“In all honesty, the script was written to me by Alfonso [Cuaron] and Jack [Thorne], and it is very similar to the movie that we ultimately wound up making,” Lowery says. “They encouraged me, though, very early on to make it my own and to take it and run with it. The process of making an animated film invlves so many steps that aren’t related to the written word. We start translating it to storyboards and you start looking at the visual representations of what the movie might become, and you begin to see things that you would’ve hae seen otherwise. That happens in live action filmmaking too, but, by that point, you’re in the rough cut stage and you can’t go back. In this cast, we’re visually creating a movie and realizing all the things it needs or could improve on to make it more personal before we’ve animated a single frame.”

Lowery and I joked that there are strict Christmas movies (your Carols and Story, respectively), but there are also films that encapsulate a feeling without including Santa Claus or gift-giving. There is a character who asks us the question directly. It’s introspective and worthy of being explored.

“John C. Reilly, as the folk singer, starting to wonder about Christmas actually came late in the game,” he admits. “The script first hit my desk in December of 2021, and it wasn’t until last Christmas that I started to really interrogate why this movie was so important to me and what made it personal. What, indeed, makes a Chistmas movie a Christmas movie and not just any other time of year movie. The most direct way to making this a movie that related to me was to address those questions head on.”

Animation was a new frontier for the director who has given us thilling flight in Pete’s Dragon and the expansive, strange world of The Green Knight. An Almost Christmas Story is filled with that same amount of awe, but it feels like it’s in our own backyard. Lowery was thrilled for a completely new challenge.

“It was honestly so liberating,” Lowery says. “I realized that, in live action, you can get to a location and it doesn’t look like what you imagine or that you can’t afford to make it the way it should be in order for it to be what you dreamed of. You have to pivot. It allowed me to indulge my perfectionist streak in a way that I’m not able to to in live action, because, sometimes, in live action, you run out of daylight ot one thing doesn’t work the way you wanted it to, and that can change everything else. Here, we can hone this into something that was exactly what I wanted it to be.”

You will notice that Lowery and his animators utilize cardboard and its pliability throughout the film. I love the flatness of the ice skaters in the rink, and when you see the squiggly innards of cardboard come into frame on the rim of a bus tire. It gives us a tangible sense that we too could create something with these simple tools. Lowery and I nerded out over the textures.

“I’m obsessed with texture,” he says. “That’s a throughline of all of my films–I really want themovies to look like something you want to touch. I always describe it as a 2D screen that we’re looking at, but you should feel like, if you were able to reach through it, you’d know what every single thing ont he screen would feel like. We were able to lean into that on a larger degree than I am usually able to do with this film.”

When Moon looks out over Rockefeller Center for the first time, we feel like we are experience a huge moment. We have seen this skating rink a million times in other films, but Lowery gives Moon a literal birdseye view of one of the most photographed areas in all of New York. That shot was inspired by a specific frame in a snowy classic from Tim Burton. Yes, I geeked out again.

“That shot is a little nod to one of my favorite shots from another kind of Christmas movie, which is Batman Returns,” he says, with a grin. “There’s an amazing angle of Batman looking down over the plaza after The Ice Princess has plunged to her death. Beautiful miniature. That’s what I wanted that to look like. My introduction to New York was almost certainly through Christmas movie. Miracle on 34th Street was the first time that I ever saw New York, and then Elf came out when I was a bit older. Certainly all of my favorite versions of New York are in movies set at Christmas.”

Right before I jumped on this Zoom, I noticed that Lowery’s birthday is on December 26th. Since mine is also between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to connect over that feeling of being born when the world seems like it stops. Everyone is still surroudned by festive colors and the decorations are still up. It provides a melancholy, stirring feeling.

“My parents felt that it was so unfair that I was born the day after Christmas, or in December in general, that they moved my birthday to March,” he says. “I didn’t know when my actual birthday was until Iw as 10 years old. I had one aunt and uncle who would always send me a birthday card at Christmas time, and I would always ask my family how they could get it wrong every year. Since the age of 10, Christmas has felt so personal, but now, as an adult, I really celebrate my birthday on the day after the holiday. We all put so much time into the buildup, but then afterwards, you have this week to sort of luxuriate in the loneliness of the quiet. Usually my wife and I enjoy each other’s company and the company of our cats. It’s such a bittersweet time of year.”

An Almost Christmas Story is streaming now on Disney+.