12 Dec 2014 1:08 PM PT
By Brian Lowery DECEMBER 15, 2014 | 07:15AM PT
Using stop-motion animation to cleverly create the feel of a holiday-special throwback, “Elf: Buddy’s Musical Christmas” — derived from the Will Ferrell movie and subsequent musical — turns out to be a whole lot of fun, proving yet again it’s hard to go wrong casting Jim Parsons in pretty much anything. Retelling the movie’s story with an assortment of songs from the musical, the one-hour special straddles that line between holiday cheer and irreverence, buoyed in part by a giddy, goofy look that nicely dovetails with Parsons’ take on the title character.
Designed to resemble one of those old Rankin/Bass productions, Buddy’s tale — as the human child inadvertently taken in by elves and raised in the North Pole — is narrated by Santa Claus (voiced by Ed Asner), racing through that backstory to get to the current one, in which Buddy travels to New York City and is reunited with his long-lost dad (Mark Hamill, who, alas, never says, “Buddy, I am your father”).
For those unfamiliar with the Broadway version, the songs are great fun, and work particularly well juxtaposed with animation, such as Santa lamenting about his relentlessly cheerful elves in the song “Happy All the Time”: “When they sing until they’re bluish, Santa wishes he were Jewish.”
The truncated format, inevitably, involves a good deal of story-crunching. But as conveyed by Parsons, who has already stuffed Warner Bros.’ stockings, and vice versa, thanks to “The Big Bang Theory,” Buddy’s childlike innocence — the proverbial fish out of water, or elf out of snow — shines through.