The Christmas Tree

To be fair, after I watched Doug Walker's review I expected this to be bad. And guess what? I was right. This is awful, stupid, poorly animated, poorly acted, and every bit as bad as I imagined. The plot goes like this. A new family arrives in town and the mother Judy (Karen Drygas) get's a job as an assistant to an evil Gestapo head of an orphanage, Mrs. Mavilda (Helen Quinn). But Judy decides that all the kids can have a good Christmas anyways. That sums up the plot. I won't explain anything else because I decided to take the time to make this review a full on rant about how awful this film is. The story is plain stupid, but honestly that is one of the redeeming qualities about the film. What really brings this crap storm is the acting. One end of the scale is Quinn who plays Mavilda, who pretty much screams at the top of her lungs and makes Nicolas Cage look subtle. On the opposite end of the scale are the child actors who make no effort whatsoever to put any kind of emotion in their characters. The other big problem is the animation which is really choppy and badly done. The film overall is just horrible! Let's just leave this pile of manure at that!

Judging by "The Christmas Tree", one would assume that producer Flamarion Ferreira and writer Nels Christianson have been isolated from the rest of humanity for most of their lives. I suppose they were going for a "family movie" vibe but everything feels... off. The plot is boring, the dialog is atrocious, and the animation is just bizarre. The whole thing is just creepy which probably isn't the adjective they were hoping would be used to describe this production. But the fact that this train wreck somehow got distribution shows that literally ANYONE can make and sell a film no matter how bad it is.

With the right execution, a combination of an animation based around Christmas could have worked out well. Unfortunately with The Christmas Tree, the execution was just wrong and it didn't work out at all. The animation is, like the three terrible animated Titanic movies, terribly static, the character designs will leave kids traumatised, there is no fluidity(and little movement, for that matter), it looks very sparse and the colours are completely flat. The synthesised music is just as creepy as the character designs, has no warmth to it and for personal tastes doesn't fit at all. The dialogue is very corny and tired, further disadvantaged by the sloppy lip-synching(find a moment where the dialogue actually matches the lip movements actually). Every bit as bad is the voice acting, which is just as bad as the voice acting for the Video Brinquedo animations, which has some of the worst voice acting in all mankind. Monotone, garbled and wooden has been described, and those three words sum the voice acting up brilliantly, if there has been worse voice acting for children in any animation(film, show or special) I've yet to hear it. You don't identify with the characters one bit, they have dull or obnoxious personalities and how they're animated and voice further accentuate that, the titular character is almost completely sidelined. And the story screams of laziness, mean-spirited instead of heart-warming, dull instead of thrilling and full of padding that has no relevance whatsoever to what's happening in the first place. Admittedly the idea wasn't a particularly great or original one to begin with, but if The Christmas Tree was watchable at least that wouldn't have mattered. So in conclusion, as bad as has been said, even worse than Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer, Legend of Frosty the Snowman, Star Wars Holiday Special and Frosty Returns(Night B4 Christmas I remember hating as well). A disgrace to animation and you won't feel festive watching it. 1/10 Bethany Cox

Before "Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa", we got this God-awful mess. Out of all the Christmas movies I've seen, this one is arguably the worst one of all. I'm serious. This is the very bottom of the barrel, and that's saying something given all the crappy movies I've watched.

The story is boring and unoriginal. How many Christmas stories involve orphans? Or a nasty Scrooge like character like Mrs. Mavilda? The only scrap of potential for a story came from the titular Pine Tree, Mrs. Hopewell, but it was all squandered. Instead, the plot focused more on Judy and her relationship with the orphans. But even then, the acting and dialogue is so wooden, it falls completely flat.

No doubt thanks to a shoe-string budget, the animation is terrible and looks maybe twenty years out of date by 1991 standards. The best we see is limited to the title card, the opening scene, and Santa Claus's clothes granting magic at the end. The colors and scenery are depressingly faded and dull looking. All the characters' movements are static and choppy looking. 90% of the time, only their eyes and mouths move as they stand around and talk, and even then, the lip sync is terrible. The character models all have dead, heavily lidded gazes like they're half-asleep. Sometimes, they looked outright creepy, like the orphans collectively smiling and nodding at Pappy and Lily with their lifeless eyes like their possessed. If that doesn't freak you out, maybe Mavilda's craggy, snarling face when she threatens to chop down Mrs. Hopewell will.

With the exception of Dingo Pictures, the voice acting here is the most ridiculously poor I've ever heard. The "voice actors" were all obviously family members of the cast and crew who had no prior experience at all. Judy and Ray sounded as if they were hopped up on something, even when they believe their daughter is dead. The mayor's voice frequently cracked. The kids were the worst. The orphan with glasses is obviously voiced by a grown woman, Lily's voice actress was so young, she spoke in unintelligible babbling half the time, and one orphan had an adults voice pitched up so much, he sounds like a Martian. Only Mavilda does an even remotely enjoyable job with her hammy, cackling villain routine, but even then, she screamed like a maniac so loudly in one scene, she broke her mic.

The corny, low-quality music sounds like it was made by a cheap electronic keyboard; a middle-schooler could have made better music. The editing was choppy, especially with the dialogue as the characters speak one line after another without pausing.

This film was just a God-awful, 45-minute disaster that lacked any heartwarming Christmas spirit. And the moral at the end was so idiotic: 'You always win when you're good' which just says that being good is a get out of jail free card. Mrs. Mavilda should have been locked up after all she did. It's all so ridiculous, it makes you want to facepalm. Even today, thirty-three years later, it's reviled as arguably the worst Christmas special ever made. Say what you want about "Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa", but at least that film had good voice talent on board. But even so, the only reason to ever watch this is to laugh at how ridiculously bad it is, so watch it for free on Tubi if you're looking for a cheap chuckle.

Christmas Tree is about orphaned kids trying to save a tree while under the care of a ruthless and greedy caretaker.

Acting - The worst group of acting of any animated movie PERIOD. The acting children are so inconsistent you wonder if they had drunk in the casting department. One sounds like they just learn how to talk, one kid sounds like they are from outer space, and one sounds like an adult. One kid you can barely understand. The actor of the father is the worst of the bunch. None of them show no emotion or effort except the caretaker Mrs. Mavilda can show too much emotion.

Sometimes you wonder if they had a director since the direction is bad and lazy

The animation is terrible and many of the aspects is terrible and can be quite creepy.