Blinky Bill's White Christmas (2005)

Flashback to 1992, and there were major changes in the air for the Australian animation squad at Yoram Gross Film Studio. To date, their legacy had been largely founded on a series of films chronicling the adventures of Dot, a heroic young girl with the ability to converse with animals, but the studio were thinking about retiring Dot (who received her final feature outing in 1994) and were eagerly in search of a new signature character to lead them toward the modern age of the approaching millennium. They found it in a fresh interpretation of Blinky Bill, a much-loved literary character created by New Zealand children's author Dorothy Wall, and a lucrative new animated franchise was swiftly born. A feature film, Blinky Bill: The Mischievous Koala, debuted in 1992 and was followed by a spin-off-TV series in 1993, which proved a smash hit not only on its native Australian soil but also in several European territories. The Adventures of Blinky Bill initially ran for two seasons between 1993 and 1995 but was given a new lease of life in 2004, when Yoram Gross, through a recently-formed partnership with German media company EM.TV (the same media company who also had The Muppets at one point in time), brought the series back for an additional season (somewhere in between, there were also unsuccessful efforts to give Flap, Blinky's platypus sidekick, his own spin-off series, but we're not talking about those today). The culmination of this revival was a Christmas special in 2005, Blinky Bill's White Christmas, which was directed by Guy Gross (son of the studio's eponymous founder) and would prove the last hurrah for the 2D incarnation of Blinky, before Yoram Gross Film Studio put him back into cold storage for a further decade and eventually rebooted him as a CG animation franchise in 2015.

Clocking in at just under 80 minutes, Blinky Bill's White Christmas was technically our second Blinky feature film, albeit made specially for television. How does it compare to The Mischievous Koala? When I reviewed that film earlier this year, I rated it as being fairly chaotic on the narrative front, what with its reliance on extensive and digressive flashback sequences, its insanely dragged out climax and its curiously abrupt ending, although I gave it strong enough marks for atmosphere and emotion. Blinky Bill's White Christmas beats its predecessor hands-down in terms of narrative consistency (White Christmas doesn't have an amazingly fleshed out story, but there's at least coherent progression from Point A to Point B), but in all other areas the 1992 feature has it licked. For one, White Christmas is nothing to write home about visually speaking. The Mischievous Koala utilised Gross's signature aerial imaging technique of superimposing animated characters onto live action backdrops, resulting in an ostensibly primitive look that's surprisingly effective at emphasising the innocence and fragility of its protagonists when stacked up against the big and tumultuous world. This was not exported into the 1993 TV series, which went with a more traditional painted background approach. By the time of the 2004 revival, the animation industry had changed significantly and a digital ink makeover was in order; as a result, the third season has a significantly altered, more vibrant and less detailed look that's difficult for me to comment on without betraying my personal preference for hand-painted cel animation. I need only glance at a frame from Season 3 and I feel over-stimulated by the immense amount of colour saturation going on. Compared to the garish simplicity of Season 3, White Christmas boasts some fairly detailed background imagery that's easier on the eye, but the mood and character of Blinky's earlier adventures is very much missed. On the plus side, original voice actors Robyn Moore and Keith Scott are still on board (with the additional voice talents of Sarah Aubrey and Shane Withington) and do as fine a job as ever.

Blinky Bill's White Christmas functions as the grand finale to The Adventures of Blinky Bill, although long-term fans of Gross's Blinky should note that two major characters from the TV series, Marcia the marsupial mouse and Shifty the dingo, are conspicuously absent here, but for a handful of very brief blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameos during the opening montage. This would be less galling if the special didn't also waste so much time with random incidental characters we've never met before and (this being the final bow for this incarnation of Blinky) won't ever see again. The main narrative arc sees Blinky and Flap travel to the fabled Wollemi forest in search of a rare pine tree, but there's also a superfluous subplot involving Miss Magpie's efforts to assemble a school choir from the talentless tykes she teaches, meaning we get lots of useless filler sequences with nobodies like Angela the possum, Johnny the weak-bladdered rabbit and Tim and Tom, bandicoot twins who trade identities on a daily basis. The purpose of this narrative thread, other than to pad White Christmas out to the full 80 minutes, feels as if it's to further impress the special's big musical centrepiece, "Christmas in Australia" by pop singer Christine Anu, onto the viewer. I can't find any evidence that the song received a proper commercial release, but the special's tendency to keep periodically emphasising its existence does have the air of an odious marketing ploy about it.

As Miss Magpie's shrill assembly of pint-sized choir animals are eager to inform us over and over, it's Christmas in Australia, and if you know nothing else about the Australian climate then know this - Australia is in the Southern Hemisphere, so over there Christmas occurs in peak summertime. The traditions and iconography of the Australian Christmas are still very heavily rooted in those of its European counterpart, however, so it is not at all uncommon for Aussies to exchange cards depicting wintry scenes and Santa Claus heavily clad in his Coca Cola-endorsed reds, right before they hit the beach for a glorious day of surfing and sunburn. Keeping in mind that Blinky had by now established a strong fanbase in Europe as well as Australia, I don't find it too far-fetched that the plot of the special was purposely designed with an eye toward bridging the gap between the sweltering Australian Christmas and the traditional European white one. Blinky picks up on the curiously discordant nature of the former when he asks Wombo, his elderly wombat mentor, why Santa would wear such a ridiculously bulky suit in the middle of summer. Wombo explains to Blinky that many of the holiday traditions with which they are familiar originate in the Northern Hemisphere, where Christmas is associated with cold and snow. Blinky finds the entire notion of a frosty Christmas to be very far-fetched at first, so Wombo shows him a home movie of a trip he made to Europe as a younger wombat, where he was able to experience one of their legendary white Christmases first-hand. During his visit, Wombo acquired a snowglobe, which he has cherished ever since, for looking upon it always reminds him of his glorious Christmas in the frozen North. The instant Wombo produced the snowglobe and explained very clearly what it meant to him, I had a sneaking suspicion that it was very unlikely to survive the special intact - the snowglobe looks extremely fragile, it's just received a wad of exposition and, let's face it, Blinky is a ticking time-bomb - and sure enough, it isn't long before Wombo's much-loved artifact is reduced to a shattered heap. Remorseful at having broken Wombo's snowglobe, Blinky decides that the only way he can possibly compensate is to recreate Wombo's white Christmas experience right there in Greenpatch. Blinky delegates the task of creating snowfall to Splodge the kangaroo and Nutsy the girl koala while he and Flap venture out into the wilderness in the hopes of bringing back another staple of the European Christmas, a decorated pine tree. Rumor has it that some rare specimens can be located in the distant Wollemi Forest, although said forest is also reputed to be home to a variety of fearsome prehistoric creatures, so most Greenpatch residents are smart enough give it a wide berth.

The antagonists of the special are a couple of professional "plant poachers" named Chopper and Sly, who also have their sights set on plundering the mysterious goodies of the Wollemi Forest. They might as well be Harry and Joe from the original film, and in fact they come across as versions of Harry and Joe that have been purposely watered down in order to appear less intimidating to younger viewers (not that Harry and Joe themselves made for particularly formidable foes during their climactic showdown with Blinky and his gang, but they were at least capable of dishing out destruction of truly cataclysmic proportions toward the start of the film). Chopper and Sly are easily my least favourite aspect of White Christmas, for their sequences are frankly even more of a chore to sit through than the aforementioned filler with Miss Magpie and her choir. If you read my review of The Mischievous Koala, you might recall me noting that Yoram Gross's take on Blinky Bill attracted some controversy for its negative portrayal of the woodchipping industry. The original feature was careful to cover itself with a disclaimer emphasising that its villains were into illegal woodchipping practices only, but I've found at least one source claiming that the Australian forest industry took offense when the lyrics "Save us from that woodchip mill!" were incorporated into the TV series' theme song. White Christmas plays things as safe as humanly possible, by giving Chopper and Sly an extensive amount of dialogue in which they plainly discuss the criminality of their own plant-harvesting actions, just so there's no confusion as to which subcategory of woodchipper Yoram Gross are condemning. Needless to say, Chopper and Sly's villainy is painted in very broad strokes, and they make for fairly unengaging antagonists, too on the nose in their misdeeds to have any kind of authenticity but also too dense and ineffectual to seem capable of causing any real harm. It doesn't help that they're a variation on the same stupid-little-skinny-guy-and-slighty-less-stupid-but-still-pretty-stupid-fat-guy schtick we've seen replicated hundreds of times in the wake of Laurel and Hardy.

Despite the 80 minute run time, there's not a whole lot actually happens in White Christmas. Blinky and Flap have various run-ins with Chopper and Sly and are eventually cornered in a cave, where they befriend a large wombat-like creature they name "Wol" (on the basis that that's the only thing he can seemingly say). Wol's species is never formally given, but he's a Diprotodon, a type of extinct giant burrowing marsupial related to the wombat (I know this, not because I'm amazing proficient in marsupial paleontology, but because Lobe once referenced the species in an episode of Freakazoid!). Wol, of course, is one of the prehistoric residents of the Wollemi Forest, but Blinky and Flap don't twig this right away. The most curious thing about Wol is that he wears a diaper, presumably as an easy shorthand to clue us in that he's only a baby, although later on when we actually get to the Wollemi Forest and meet the rest of its oddball menagerie they turn out to be largely non-anthropomorphic and are quite content to strut around in the nude, so...who among them forces Wol to wear a diaper for his modesty/convenience? Then again, we don't really get to spend a lot of time in the Wollemi itself. The obvious dilemma Blinky faces, as he finally reaches the forest, is whether or not it's ethical for him to cut down and make off with an endangered tree, even for something as ostensibly unselfish as a friend's Christmas celebrations. This is where the bulk of the special's drama lies, for we never sense that Chopper and Sly pose much of a threat to the forest (and indeed, Wol's father is quite capable of seeing unwanted encroachers off himself, without the aid of Blinky or Flap). It's here that White Christmas would really have benefited from a sprinkling of the trademark melancholia that ran rife throughout the Dot features and The Mischievous Koala, in order to convey a sense of the Wollemi Forest being something very special and vulnerable. As it is, the Wollemi is really just a bland forest populated by slightly odd-looking creatures who don't talk or wear clothes (Wol's mysterious diaper notwithstanding). Evidently, it's meant to be a place that time forgot, but not enough is done to instill it with its own unique atmosphere or mystique. In the end, Blinky decides that he cannot cut down one of the wollemi pines and risk destroying the homes of any of the forest's residents, but regrets not having anything to show for his troubles to Wombo...whereupon Wol gets him out of his spot by gifting him with a small potted wollemi seedling. A sweet gesture, although it does raise further questions, such as where did Wol even manage to get hold of that pot in the first place? Like his diaper, it somewhat undermines the implicit idea that that these creatures are meant to be untouched by civilisation, be it that of humans or anthropmorphic bush critters.

Overall, most of what I've had to say about White Christmas has probably sounded overwhelmingly negative, so I should emphasise that I don't dislike the special, I just don't think that it benefited in any shape or form from being dragged out to feature length. There's probably just enough plot here to fill out a standard 22 minute episode of the regular TV series. Trim off the subplot fat involving the choir animals and Splodge and Nutsy (whom we keep checking in on intermittently), along with any conversation between Sly and Chopper that goes on for more than five seconds, and you'd be left with a much slicker (although still unremarkable) product. At 80 minutes, White Christmas is a pleasant but soporific experience, one that will likely struggle to retain the interests of older viewers.

The juiciest aspect of Blinky Bill's White Christmas occurs in the last few seconds of the special, when it decides, quite out of the blue, to throw a genuine curiosity at us. Blinky and Flap return to Greenpatch with an additional souvenir in the form of Sly and Chopper's woodchipper (possibly a deliberate callback to Blinky and his gang hijacking Harry and Joe's vehicle at the end of the original film), to discover that Splodge and Nutsy's efforts to create genuine snowfall have all ended in failure. That's when Blinky hits upon the idea of creating a kind of faux snowfall by feeding the woodchipper old newspapers and sprinkling the cut up shreds of paper over Greenpatch like confetti (I was somewhat surprised that a special with such an explicitly eco-friendly story would go with a solution that's basically tantamount to littering, but so long as the residents of Greenpatch are prepared to chip in to clean it up afterward...). The outcome seems to satisfy Wombo, and the special ends with all of the animals gathered together beneath Blinky's paper storm, singing one last rendition of that infernal "Christmas in Australia" song. That's when we pan away to reveal that the entire scene is actually just something Blinky is observing inside a snowglobe, just before he turns to wish the viewer a merry Christmas. And that's how the 2D version of Yoram Gross's Blinky permanently signs off. I...have no idea what to make of that ending, but I instantly get flashbacks to another TV show that infamously opted to end with the inexplicable implication that the entire series was nothing more than an idle daydream going on inside the head of a child with a snowglobe fixation. Are we supposed to draw similar conclusions about Blinky Bill's entire canon? I don't know, but I'm happy to step back and let the fan theories commence.