I noted a short while ago that it took just shy of a decade for The Snowman, Dianne Jackson's acclaimed 1982 adaptation of Raymond Briggs' 1978 children's book, to receive any kind of real successor, in the form of Dave Unwin's 1991 animation Father Christmas. When I said "real successor", I should specify that I was thinking very strictly in terms of festive entertainment based upon the works of Briggs (and, in the case of The Snowman and Father Christmas, an overlapping narrative universe). What I did not then take into consideration is that there were, in the interim years, a selection of noteworthy animated specials that were clearly riding on the coattails of The Snowman - among them, Granpa from 1989, which was also directed by Jackson for Channel 4 and, much like The Snowman, boasted a score composed by Howard Blake. Less directly connected, but no less a product of the "Snowman effect", was Grasshopper Productions' The Angel and The Soldier Boy, which also appeared during the 1989 festive season, but on BBC One, and might be seen as a rival production to Granpa. Directed by Alison De Vere, the film was adapted from a 1987 picture book by Peter Collington, which, much like Briggs' The Snowman, was comprised entirely of wordless images. The ingredients that made The Snowman such an enduring classic are all here, and honestly, they work just as effectively. Both films assume a child's eye perspective of the world, in which all manner of wonderful things could potentially occur wherever adult attentions are diverted, but with a distinctly melancholic tone; the beauty and the curiosity of the narrative worlds therein are matched by their vulnerability, the wistful sense that their treasures are only ephemeral and, like childhood itself, will evaporate all too soon. In both films, the soundtrack plays an indispensable role in determining this other-worldly mood and character; in the case of The Angel and The Soldier Boy this came courtesy of Irish folk group Clannad (whose previous soundtrack credentials included the 1984 series Robin of Sherwood and the 1989 documentary Atlantic Realm). Clannad also composed an original song for the film, the lovely, haunting ballad "A Dream In The Night", which to my ears stands shoulder to shoulder with "Walking In The Air" (the one area where The Snowman has it beat, however, is that The Angel and The Soldier Boy has no obvious equivalent to the "Walking In The Air" sequence itself, an animation moment so epic and transcendental that it thrills us no matter how many times we've seen it). Both films also received soundtrack releases containing spoken word versions of the story - for The Snowman, narration was supplied by Bernard Cribbins, while the audio version of The Angel and The Soldier Boy was narrated by Tom Conti.
The plot of The Angel and The Soldier Boy could be described as a non-verbal, more ethereal version of Toy Story, in following the nocturnal adventures of a pair of miniature dolls belonging to a small girl. The dolls, the titular angel and soldier, are deeply devoted to one another, something that is put to the test when a disturbance to their peaceful equilibrium causes them to be torn apart and pit against the wider world beyond their owner's bedroom. While the girl is sleeping, her piggy bank, containing a single pound coin, is attacked and looted by a band of pirates, who have materialised from the pages of the picture book she was reading on the preceding evening. The soldier boy intervenes and attempts to stop them, but is overpowered and carried off by the pirates. When the angel awakens and discovers he is missing, she journeys out into the vast unknown, determined to reunite with her beloved companion and retrieve the stolen treasure. She is helped in her mission by a couple of resourceful plush toys, a mouse and a bear, and hindered by the family cat, who reacts much as you would expect a cat to react toward any miniature being unlucky enough to cross its path. At the end (and very much unlike Toy Story), there is ambiguity as to whether the events of the film were real, or a dream of the sleeping girl, who awakens with what appears to be intuitive knowledge of how the angel and the soldier boy have assisted her.
Although faithful to the set-up and imagery of Collington's book, De Vere's film makes a number of notable changes to the original story, which seem largely geared towards making it a fuller narrative with a more conventionally dramatic climax. Whereas Collington's book opens with the girl and her mother already in the process of reading the pirate book, the film contains an expanded prologue establishing that the narrative events take place after the girl's birthday, and that all of the key items - the angel and the soldier boy, the pirate book, the piggy bank and the pound coin - were given to her as presents. The film omits the single interlude of Collington's book that frankly never sat well with me - the gratuitously brutal part where the angel fends off and kills an attacking wasp by lancing it with the soldier's sword - and instead has her be attacked by a couple of flies and a spider, all of whom survive the experience. Finally, the third act differs quite significantly (even if the ultimate conclusion is effectively the same); in the book, the angel rescues the soldier boy while the pirates are sleeping, and the two of them manage to uncover the coin and transport it back to the girl's bedroom without attracting the attentions of either the pirates or the cat, but in this version of the story they are noticed and relentlessly pursued by the pirates the entire way back. The plush mouse and bear were seen in Collington's book, but did not come to life to assist the title characters as they do here. The pirates are also clearly vanquished in De Vere's film, something that does not happen in Collington's book, with the angel and soldier boy managing to banish them back into the pages of the book from which they came (in the book, there is nothing to suggest that the pirates, whether real or constructs of the girl's imagination, will not return to strike again on a different night, but perhaps the reassurance of that final image is enough to counteract our concerns).
Much of the appeal of Collington's imagery comes from its clever use of perspective, as the dolls navigate the assorted features of an ostensibly mundane household, which from their eye-view appear vast and overwhelming (recreated from Collington's illustrations, in De Vere's film, is an image the of the girl's bed, which seems to stretch out into infinity as the angel leaves the raided piggy bank and first sets out on her journey). A certain tension develops between the reader's recognition of the obstacles in question, and their evident unfamiliarity to the heroes. Sometimes the reader's knowledge is a step ahead of that of the characters - for example, the reader is aware of the cat stalking the angel before the angel herself becomes aware, and the nature of the threat is immediately comprehensible to the reader (note that this is not the case in the spoken word version, where Conti introduces the cat as a "monster with slanting yellow eyes"). At other times, the readers' perspective is more closely aligned with the limited scope of the characters, such as when the angel, pursued by the cat, seeks refuge beneath a piano; initially, only the pedals of the piano are shown, so the reader might not instantly recognise the object as a piano. The ordinary, Collington posits, can take on dynamic new life when presented through fresh eyes. Still, for all of the hostility the dolls encounter in the animal life lurking around the household, the greatest adversity comes from their pirates nemeses who originate from the same realm of childhood fantasy, but are presented as intruders who threaten the peace of both the dolls and the girl, tearing the angel and the soldier boy apart and stealing the girl's savings. They are a contaminating presence, intent on disrupting the girl's childhood idyll by subverting it into something more precarious and fraught with peril; it is perhaps fair to say that the dolls and the pirates represent opposite sides of the same coin. As to the literal coin at the centre of their dispute, in both the book and the film there is humor to be found in seeing the dolls and
the pirates grapple over what is, in the wider scheme of things, a pretty
insignificant treasure, yet it clearly seems much greater to their
miniaturised world; we suspect that the pound coin's value is similarly
magnified in the eyes of the girl, for it is all the money she has in
the world. When the coin is deposited inside the piggy bank, it
represents an investment in her future; as such, it takes on far more
than its immediate worth, and when the dolls and the pirates fight for
ownership of the coin they are effectively battling for dominance of the girl's blossoming psyche. Similarly, the angel's need to confront the world beyond the girl's bedroom can be seen a a projection of the girl's own mounting awareness of the world beyond her own unfledged scope. As with The Snowman, the real underlying threat throughout appears to be time, and the certainty that, eventually, all things must change.
I have long interpreted The Snowman as a celebration of the beautiful moments in life that cannot last, with the final, tragic images serving as acknowledgement of their impermanence. There are no villains in the film, except for our intuitive understanding that when the sun comes out, the snowman will inevitably disappear. The destruction of the snowman, and the grief exhibited by his young creator, could be interpreted as a metaphor for the loss of a loved one, or alternatively the waning of childhood innocence, with the boy's soaring fantasies ultimately proving no match for the harshness of reality. Of course, the film closes with the boy discovering that he still has the scarf he received from Father Christmas during his adventure with the snowman, suggesting that a part of what he has lost has survived, and will stay with him (note that this aspect of the story is exclusive to Jackson's film; the scarf did not feature in Briggs' book). The film could thus be read as a meditation on the successful navigation of change, and the preservation of emotional integrity, even if it closes at the rawest possible moment. The Angel and The Soldier Boy, which entails a similar intersection of the domestic and the fantastical, but takes the form of a more conventional struggle between the forces of darkness and light, shares a similar preoccupation with the ephemeral nature of childhood, something that is more pronounced in De Vere's film. The decision to make the girl's birthday the narrative starting point links the events therein more obviously to her personal growth. Judging by the number of candles on her cake the girl has just turned six - she still has a long way to go before puberty and adulthood is certainly nothing more than a vague flicker on the far horizon, but already she is beginning to feel the threat that her world is slowly evolving, with the presents she receives - the dolls, the pirate book, the piggy bank and the coin - all being tokens of this incoming change. Unlike in Collington's book, in which the girl is seen reading the pirate book with her mother and falls asleep immediately after, De Vere's film makes the noteworthy alteration of having the girl continue to read in secret after her mother has left the room. Here, she falls asleep while reading, causing the book to slip from her hands and land upon the bedroom floor, and enabling the pirates to emerge from the sprawled-open pages (in the original story, the pirates seem to have no difficulty crawling up from the book while its pages are closed). This encroachment on the girl's childhood utopia is thus linked to an overstepping of her own bounds; the pirates enter in because the girl grows a little too curious about the darker world beyond her own callow existence, and chooses to explore it without the guidance of adult authority. At the end of the film, when the pirates have been returned to the book, the awakened girl is contented to leave it lying on the bedroom floor, even as she restores the dolls and the piggy bank to their proper places (something underscored in the audio version, where Conti states that, "The pirate book could stay there"); she has decided that the darkness and danger of the world, enticing as it is, should remain untouched for now. It is, nonetheless, lying dormant, waiting to be picked up and rediscovered on a subsequent evening.
Unlike the hero of The Snowman, the girl is ostensibly given a reprieve at the end of the story; the intrusion is fought off and the purity of her childhood utopia is apparently preserved, as is signified in her being permitted to sleep once again with her fantastical protectors by her side. Yet it is not exactly an ending in which the status quo has been restored. The final images of both Collington's book and De Vere's film emphasise that a vital change has taken place; whereas the girl had previously slept with the angel and soldier boy close by upon her pillow, their position has now shifted so that they are kept firmly within her hands while she sleeps. This represents a solidifying of the bond between the girl and her dolls, while also being indicative of the girl's newfound attunement to the dangers of her world. It is evident that a disturbance has been felt by the girl, and that she has adjusted her outlook accordingly. Though she is shown returning to sleep at the end of the story, the girl has undergone an awakening, one less dramatic than that experienced by the boy in The Snowman, but indicating a similar development in her understanding of the world. Unlike the boy, the girl has not experienced loss, but she has experienced the fear of loss (perhaps vicariously, via the temporary separation of the angel and the soldier boy), and has assumed the role of protector. This leads us into the crucial question dangled at the end of the story - did the dolls and the pirates really come to life and battle for the ownership of the girl's coin, or did the girl simply dream it following an overindulgence of pirate lore? In both the book and the film, this particular narrative possibility is
implemented so subtly that it may go altogether unnoticed by younger
audiences, who are presumably more liable to read the story at its surface level. At the end of the book, the angel and the soldier boy manage to restore the coin and piggy bank to the girl's bedside table and find their own way back to the pillow before the girl awakens. Nothing has changed physically about the arrangement she discovers on awakening, but the girl is visibly unsettled, and she checks, seemingly by reflex, that both of her dolls are still present. She kisses them appreciatively, before reaching across for her piggy bank, which she keeps similarly close in the final illustration, presumably to protect it from any additional pirate attacks. The pig, curiously, is not included in the final embrace in De Vere's film, where the girl seems quite content to leave it in its designated spot on the bedside table (perhaps as further reassurance that the pirates have been defeated, at least for the time being). In the film, the girl also awakens to more of a physical disturbance, with the book, dolls and piggy bank all having been displaced to her bedroom floor - arguably, this detracts from the interpretation that the story, in this particular retelling, was merely a dream, as it is not clear how the dolls and pig might then have found their way to the floor (unless the girl did a heap of tossing and turning in her sleep). Nevertheless, the Clannad song that plays during the end-credits, advising us that "Dreams can be so real and so true", does appear to connect the events to the girl's nocturnal fantasies and the persuasive life they assume.
There is, likewise, ambiguity in the closing imagery - although the girl holds her toys in a final protective embrace (implying that she has graduated to being a parental figure of sorts), we sense that there is mutual reassurance in their arrangement, with the girl drawing confidence from the knowledge that the angel and the soldier boy are safely at her side. They have, much like the pirates, entered the girl's life as souvenirs of her ongoing progression, but they represent a counterbalance to the precariousness introduced by the pirates. As she is exposed to the darkness of the world, so too does she develop the strength and resilience to rise to whatever challenges are thrown her way, with the angel and the soldier boy serving as totems for these qualities. This mastery of her insecurities is conveyed differently according to medium - in Collington's book, the house becomes less terrifying on the return journey, with little stirring other than the angel and the soldier boy, and the cat who previously menaced the angel now dozing peacefully, while in De Vere's film every step of the return journey becomes a struggle, but the pirates suffer a more conventional defeat at the end. That the girl may not, in either case, have seen the last of these pirates does not matter; her ability to weather the adversity they bring is also flourishing. At the end of the spoken word version, Conti informs us that she will "wake up properly and play with [the dolls] in the morning", indicating that she relishes the prospect of whatever lies ahead in her continuously changing world.
Finally, I want to make note of the title sequences in De Vere's film, which do something that Collington's book did not - they offer us an exterior view of the house in which the entirety of the narrative action unfolds. In Collington's illustrations, our only window into the outside world was through the vague, distant glimpses through the literal windows during the portion of the story in which the angel scouts the various upstairs rooms for signs of the soldier boy, passing several sleeping family members; presumably, from the dolls' perspective the whole notion of a larger outside world would be utterly incomprehensible. In De Vere's film, the exterior shots serve an additional narrative purpose, in establishing an important transition; at the beginning, the girl's friends are seen leaving after her birthday celebration, signifying the onset of evening and the time in which the dream world becomes active. As the end-credits roll, and Clannad are heard singing about the beauty of dreams, we again see the house from the outside, surrounded by the dark of night, cluing us in that the dream world has not yet subsided and that the girl's imagination potentially has more wonders in store before the night is out. The glimpse of the house from the outside also acts as a reminder of the wider perspective; having spent the film immersed in a vigorous struggle between miniature beings that, for as long as it lasted, might as well have been the centre of the entire universe, seeing the house from the outside calls to mind just how small and fragile these dolls - and indeed the house's human occupants - are in the grander scheme. From an outside perspective, very little of real significance has occurred throughout this dream in the night. But it sure did mean the world from within.
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