Excerpt from piece on 1945's A Christmas Dream

Thursday 12/11/25

As it says. A Christmas Dream is a stop-motion Czech film.

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A Christmas Dream is a film that can go a couple of ways. Either it soothes your festal soul—a cinematic version of dancing sugar plum visions—or it disturbs you. The girl’s dream is remarkably “awake.” Real. There’s a tactility to this experience. A dream with wakefulness—it’s Christmas, when such things are possible. And danger as well.                        

The rag doll is willing to risk his life—there’s a deadly fan, for instance—just to impress this child. He’s both the lord of the dance and a performing, unpaid employee. She seems pleased—a slumbering tyke analogue for Clara in the second act of The Nutcracker—but we know how life can be for a toy and that a child’s love isn’t forever. The best a toy might hope for—and, come to think of it, many of us—is to be a pleasant memory sometime later for someone else. Allowing that you weren’t thrown away and destroyed.

Creatures that ought to be inanimate that dance around a child’s bed are naturally suggestive of horror. Any creatures, save the family pets. This isn’t a wealthy family. The tree is a real straggler with spindly branches that look like bony fingers. We aren’t so much as scared as knocked off kilter by a lived-in, emotional Christmas space.

Think of A Christmas Dream as the oneiric stop-motion cousin of the Val Lewton-produced The Curse of the Cat People from the year before. In that picture, a lonely girl either conjures or is visited by a friend from the beyond. We’re never sure which. Again, there’s that off-kiltering effect. We’re put on our sides and made to view the world—and what Christmas reveals about it—from a different angle, with virtuosic, legato, and, yes, dream-like smoothness and clarity.

It’s strange what can give us nightmares. The Heat Miser in Rankin-Bass’s The Year Without a Santa Claus, for example, and he’s meant to be funny. Or Santa in the flesh. Had you ventured downstairs and witnessed a jolly, rotund elf come barreling down your chimney, you’d likely have fled back to your room, rather than stand there in silent fascination, observing this fellow’s every movement until he touched a finger to his nose and shot himself back up to your roof. That would be traumatizing. Who’d believe you? And remember: We must believe survivors.

But thankfully Santa has a way of making these midnight creeps of his work—for many, if not all. There are the who’s been naughty and who’s been nice lists which get the brunt of the hype this time of year, but, alas, in this world there’s a different, overarching manner of record, and that’s the haves and have nots. A parent of a child who wants for that which they rarely get will desire to look away from A Christmas Dream (or “wake” from it). And perhaps the parent who spoils their kids for a form of clout in their particular social circle could be spooked into a degree of shame. A reminder that the gift of kindness never gets old or expires or left out on the curb to be replaced a few Christmases later by something better.