You know it’s Christmas when the cast listings for the latest movie line-up consist of more fictitious characters than real ones. We’ve got dancing penguins in Happy Feet, mice with attitude in Flushed Away, and now, to ensure the smiles stay plastered on those precious little faces, a fire-breathing dragon in Eragon. It seems that the real world isn’t interesting enough anymore. Forget It's A Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street. At times, the animated expressions on the faces of our computer generated friends tug harder at the heartstrings than those of any human. Their digitally programmed problems, perhaps to a new sparkly eyed generation, seem far more compelling than the woes of our own troubled race.
Maybe it’s escapism we crave at Christmas. After all, it’s stressful enough gathering up all those gifts, without having to worry we’ve offended the family of Jews next door with our festive, flickering lights. As tragedy and trauma rains upon our lowly planet, sometimes running away seems the easiest option. And as board games are replaced with evenings around the television, and quiet reading time is traded for control of a video games console, it’s hardly surprising we’re all being drawn deeper into a world that doesn’t even exist...
Still, whether it’s a shame, a welcome relief, or a bit of both depending on the situation, this journey away from everything we know is one movie-makers have been encouraging us to take since Hollywood first started churning out films. It’s learning to exist in a place that’s not as interesting or fun that has always been the problem. The Wizard of Oz, now re-released in digitally re- 
mastered glory is a family-favourite example of good old-fashioned escapism, beyond simply sitting in a cinema and letting a story surround you. Dorothy’s black and white world lacks the colours of her imagination, yet in ‘finding her way’ across technicoloured Munchkin territory, she still winds up in her own back yard - a simple story of lessons learned and the perils of taking things for granted.
Worlds of colour have come so far with CGI and special effects, that movie-makers might think it takes more than a decent moral cause, a yellow brick road and a pair of ruby slippers to satisfy these days. But in their efforts to impress, they’ve opened the doors to an abundance of places we could never have imagined in our dreams.
Or could we? Take the world of Eragon, for example, whisked from the pages of a bestselling novel. Perhaps the trouble with making movies from successful books is that in a vast majority of cases, some of the best parts are eliminated. At times it seems that in attempting to create a visual definition of an author’s imaginings, we lose that little bit of magic we added ourselves along the way. Harry Potter, perhaps, was a rare exception – delighting kids and adults alike with the chance to watch an actual Quidditch game in motion, and a geeky, bespectacled kid conquer evil. In Eragon however, a tale of a young dragon rider’s shoot to glory, the voice of our obligingly good-looking hero’s dragon holds n
ot the gravelly, forboding tone of a fire-breathing, fictitious creature that we might expect. And even though there’s reason for it – hey, she’s a nice dragon – we’re still left wishing she didn’t sound like a 21 year old nursery school assistant, who’s about to place everyone on the naughty-step. She certainly didn’t in our head.
In Happy Feet, an animated tale about a penguin keen to discover his heart-song, we meet a whole host of creatures who hold much more emotional appeal than the sorority sisters in festive horror flick, Black Christmas. These giggling nuisances are coincidentally, also on a mission; theirs is to stay alive in the face of a serial killer. It’s a sad day when you wipe a tear from your eye over a digitally positioned bird on an ice-cap, and sigh in bored annoyance when another blonde “actress” gets her face wrapped up in a bin-liner. It might be a totally different genre, but when we’re longing to see around the corner of a computer generated snow-scene, whilst real actors express real emotions over real life, love and death on a screen three doors down, you have to wonder which worlds we’ll be stepping into in the future, without a care as to whose career might be suffering.
Speaking of suffering careers, it’s a small wonder that the four leads in rom-com The Holiday manage to hold up such exceptional jobs in media, when they clearly have no communication skills at all. Cameron Diaz plays a movie commercial mogul whose boyfriend has been cheating on her, while Kate Winslett plays a lovesick journalist at The Daily Telegraph, whose ex is about to get married. Instead of Cameron’s character editing a hot movie about said cheating s
cumbag and pasting it Paris Hilton style on the web, and Kate’s writing (and publishing) a cleverly disguised and scathing report on her exe’s loathsome ways, the pair swap houses and countries in search of a soul-mending, solitary Christmas. Of course, both find love and in Cameron’s case, tears, and everything’s amazing. But the first plot would have been more realistic. The first plot embraces the real world, real emotions previously only seen on a lovelorn penguin. It’s a world from which more often than not, the glitzy, glamorous characters of Hollywood exclude us.
Escaping our own dilemmas is a commonplace desire at Christmas, and however ridiculous the plot, or far-fetched the idea, the world of film’s been welcoming us in for decades. This year is no exception. When heartfelt push comes to digitally created shove, whether we’re running away with dancing penguins, or revelling in an over-the-top love story based in a world we’ll never even know, we’ll always need somewhere else to go in our imaginations. We can only hope they never take things too far. When there are presents to unwrap, books to be read and crackling fires to sit around with the family, sometimes the real world ain’t so bad after all. - By Becky Wicks
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