I was sent a copy of ‘The Tangerine Bear’ from my good buddy in the states ‘Triv’ of ‘Trivial Theater’. She rescued it from a dollar bin, and honestly. if you’ve seen or read ‘The Tangerine Bear’ thats probably the most fitting story of how it arrived in my film collection that it’s possible to have.

Its a 48 minute special from 1999 adapted from the book ‘The Tangerine bear’ initially published in 1997, and tells the story of ‘Bear’ a teddy bear who ends up in an accident at the bear manufacturing plant where he inadvertently ends up with his smile stitched on upside down.

After having it drilled into bear that he needs to ‘find a family’ in order to have a happy life, he’s disheartened when he arrives in a big toystore and noone wants him, he eventually winds up on the ‘clearence’ table where he realises that he’s got a frown where a smile should be, but he’s chipper resolving that he’s ‘Smiling on the inside’ and that the right family will see that in him and pick him up…They dont. In fact, the entire rest of the clearence table more or less sells, before he’s bundled into a trunk and sent to ‘Winkles Emporium’ a 2nd hand/defect shop where the clearence stuff goes and Mr. Winkle fixes what he can before selling it on at a ‘Name your price’ fire sale.

‘Bear’ here meets Jack (a jack in the box) Vernon (a bull dog who acts as security) Bird (a damaged coo-coo clock, and Lorelei (a mermaid with a clock on her belly). and we enter a slow but warming period of bonding between the characters as they discuss tips on how to be sold, and they try to figure out their place in the world.

And, while this one does open a little haphazardly, and is a little imperfect. I personally quite enjoyed this one. I think at 48 minutes this ones kind of breezy, it definitely could run shorter. But I didnt mind the length particularly and the pacing is pretty breakneck for what is supposed to be a young kids christmas movie. Tonally its upbeat, charming and has a really strong message about being yourself and finding your purpose and family from within yourself, rather than trying to fit in other peoples boxes or aspire to someone elses goals.

It is however a film thats not without its problems. The opening act is a little overly generic, and it takes quite a bit of time to get to ‘Winkles Emporium’ which is basically where the film starts proper…Which isnt great, especially for a kids movie, where you really dont want to overcomplicate things or take a while to get started (attention spans and all that)

The scene in ‘Krolls department store’ with the clearence toys felt a bit out of place as well…Generally in the first act, you want to take your time to establish the characters your going to spend the rest of the movie with. Here we’re introduced to Louie (a blue monkey) and Dolly (…a doll…I…dont know why shes in clearence…they dont say what her defect is…) But seemingly they introduce these characters just to establish that Bear HAS a physical defect and to set up the idea of rejected toys…when it probably would have made much more narrative sense to just have bear go to ‘Winkles’ immediately after not selling, and then have Jack and co more warmly introduce the idea that Bear is ‘perfectly imperfect’.

The film does have some pacing issues around its musical numbers too. It cant seem to decide if it wants to be a musical number or not. We get 2-3 numbers in the opening 10-15 minutes of the film, and another 2-3 in the last 10-15 minutes. But the middle of the film is a gulf of pure story…Which did throw me a bit, because RIGHT as I started wondering if this WAS intending to be a musical film or not, they then kicked back in with the music stuff.

And probably the most glaring issue this film had for me really was the frankly bizarre decision to mix animation styles across the full runtime, with some characters having a rather simple ‘line drawing’ style appearence, and others looking like semi-nightmarish Phillips CD-i creations with a smoother frame rate. They shove these two styles together and it really put me off. I’d have much rather the film had a consistent style for its characters and a sense of uniformity, rather than the whole thing feeling like it was a mish mash of styles and tones.

Outside of that though, *most* of the musical numbers are solid enough, the voice cast are animate, lively and fit their roles nicely. I do *kind* of wish there was a little more to the story as they do repeat a couple of plot points in this with minor variations…But ultimately? I really kind of liked this one.

I dont think it’s going to set anyones socks on fire, but I really liked the messeging, the script came across as sincere, charismatic and tonally sound. In a sea of mediocre christmas specials ‘The Tangerine Bear’ stands out *just* enough, that I actually feel like I could probably revisit this one year on year.

Its available for free on youtube if your curious, i’d suggsest watching it there and if you like it, grabbing a copy is recommended. I’ll be hanging on to mine.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/the-tangerine-bear-home-in-time-for-christmas/