Arthur Christmas

Arthur Christmas is a funny, generous family film with a slightly overstuffed journey, and we recommend it with that small warning. Director Sarah Smith takes the question of how billions of presents arrive in one night seriously enough to find comedy in the work. Christmas delivery has to be organised, and the people doing the organising have opinions about their own importance. The family competition gives the adventure something adults can recognise without requiring the children to sit through a separate set of jokes.

The script by Sarah Smith and Peter Baynham gets much of its bite from complacency and competitiveness within Santa’s family. It understands how readily a discussion about doing a job becomes a discussion about who deserves the credit. That makes room for dry comedy around Jim Broadbent’s Santa and Hugh Laurie’s Steve, while James McAvoy gives Arthur the earnestness the story needs. Arthur is less interesting than several of the people around him, but his sincerity helps us care when the action starts crowding out the characters.

Bill Nighy has the more immediately rewarding part as Grandsanta, whose irreverence keeps the family squabbles from becoming too wholesome. He gives the jokes enough impatience to suggest that being old has not made this man more reasonable. Ashley Jensen’s Bryony is just as welcome, because her gift-wrapping competence is funny without making competence itself ridiculous. We laughed at how seriously Bryony takes wrapping a present; Ashley Jensen makes a narrow speciality feel like a perfectly respectable reason for pride.

Evgeni Tomov’s production design makes Santa’s high-tech delivery business a useful source of comedy. There is pleasure in seeing a familiar Christmas task treated as something requiring this much organisation, and the visual detail rewards attention even when the story is hurrying along. The animation is busy, but that busyness suits a film interested in the practicalities of an enormous delivery job. Christmas films can get away with a fairly vague assortment of lights and sparkle; this one gives us equipment to look at and work to follow.

That hurry is also the main reservation. Editors James Cooper and John Carnochan keep the jokes coming, although the middle begins to feel extended by the sheer number of things happening. We wanted a little more time with the family and a little less travelling between distractions. Harry Gregson-Williams’s music gives the adventure plenty of energy, which suits the action even when the action itself could stand to calm down.

At 97 minutes, it is hardly an ordeal, and the warmth survives the commotion. The story uses familiar Christmas lessons, but it bothers to make the people delivering them funny, fallible and sometimes irritating. That matters in a family animation: kindness becomes easier to believe when it comes from characters who have not spent the whole film behaving impeccably. The humour gives the expressions of affection enough credibility to work.

For family viewing, the main qualification is a tolerance for bustle. The U certificate does not promise a quiet evening. Give the jokes some attention, particularly when Bryony is at work. There is no obligation to point out which relative resembles Grandsanta.