A staple of early 2000s ‘Cartoon Network’ and probably the last Christmas special I’ll watch for this year. ‘Grandma Got Run Over By A Raindeer’ is the…unusual end product of someone saying ‘Hey everyone loves that hokey christmas novelty song, why not animate it and see what happens!?’

Well, i’ll tell you what the end result is…strangeness and a kind of incoherent story that may or may not be fleshed out with tracks from the album that the titular track came from (I havent got the volition to search it up…its 4:30am as I type this)

The Plot jumps around in time a little bit but basically covers the ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’ of the events of the song. With the film opening establishing that ‘Grandma’ is in fact the owner of one of ‘Cityvilles’ most loved and longest established general stores. Grandma is an old time store owner and is more than happy to offer regulars store credit to get through hard times…Much to the annoyance of ‘Cousin Mel’ who wants Grandma to sell up the shop to a local land tycoon whos willing to offer the family millions to sell the shop so it can be demolished and replaced with…something? the…the special doesnt really say I dont believe.

Anyway, cousin Mel decides to try and force the issue by spiking some of Grandmas fruit cakes with ‘something bad’ in the hopes that it’ll drive customers away and eventually force the sale of the store…But before that can happen, Grandma heads out on christmas eve night to get her medication from the store and winds up getting run over by Santas sleigh. with the only witnesses being Grandmas Grandson (who may or may not be the narrator)…and Grandpa.

The family naturally dont believe the tale…But when Grandmas body cant be found, and she isnt at the usual places, concern begins to set in…Meanwhile Cousin Mel takes the opportunity to weedle a ‘power of attorney’ placement out of Grandpa, and in turn begins the negotiations to sell the store. With time fast running out, Its down to the doting grandson to piece together the clues, find Grandma and get her back up and running before the stores closed for good!

I have somewhat nostalgic memories catching this over the years on Cartoon Network…But watching it now…it…has not aged well. Cash in is about as good as I can muster for this one…an attempt to revive interest in a novelty record that was a little stinky the year it came out, letalone 16 years after it got a release…

The scripts all over the place, with act structuring and pacing thats inconsistent, it cant quite nail the tone of humour it wants to go with swinging wildly between being semi serious to ‘Scrubs’ style ‘pop aways’ into sequences of Cousin mel conga dancing with her lawyer, or Grandpa thinking hes Elvis.

The humours so scattershot that it got a chuckle more for how surreal and all over the place it was really than anything it intentionally tried to do. The act structurings all over the place, the characters have next to no depth. and the ending is quite underwhelming even for the low bar this special set.

The animation is semi consistent, but I cant lie, I personally find it a bit ugly…the promotional materials seem to have been done in a slightly different art style, which DOES look pretty okay…But the animation itself is a little too mixed on style, they’re all in vaguely the same ball park, but characters are *just* different enough style wise to create an unsettling contrast.

Not helped either by the fact they recycle chunks of the special BACK INTO itself for the music video breaks…OR that they even HAVE music video breaks here…

The voice acting is fine enough, not great…but gets the job done and the score swings WILDLY between frankly terrible and genuinely bizarre in the best possible way.

I still get quite nostalgic about this strange little special, but 21 years of film making, a degree in media and film production and theory and 7 and a half years of working in film journalism/criticism REALLY does not go in this films favour. I dont think its very good ultimately, and i’d say unless you were nostalgic for this (having seen it when it first went out) OR if you like bad holiday specials. I dont think you’ll really get a kick out of this one.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/grandma-got-run-over-by-a-reindeer/