Why the Rankin/Bass Specials Are the Very Best Kind of Christmas Magic

IndieWire reached out to a number of current animators about the eternal appeal of the Rankin/Bass stop motion and animated holiday specials like "Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer" and "Jack Frost."

In the spirit of the magic of the season (and in hopes of providing some warm respite from the usual end-of-the-year best-of deluge of stories and their attendant doldrums), IndieWire is proud to present our first-ever Holiday Week.

There are a lot of movies that are designed to lift your spirits over the holidays, but there just is something about the Rankin/Bass Christmas specials from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s that hit. Rankin/Bass — aka the production company founded by Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass — actually outsourced most of its stop-motion animation and traditional animation production work to vendors in Japan, including Toei, which would then go on to make anime legends “Dragon Ball Z,” “Sailor Moon,” and “One Piece.” 

Rankin/Bass released some 17 Christmas specials for television, starting in 1964 with “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and ending in 1985 with “The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus.” Most of these made-for-TV films were written by Romeo Muller. He was born in New York City but might also have been an elf. That’s how adept he was at using the landscape of animation and children’s entertainment to actually tackle the mixed emotions that define Christmas: A bittersweet sense of loss and loneliness, and an unquenchable sense of hope and community. Muller’s final cartoon, a short from the early ’90s called “Noel,” is a Christmas special that expresses the sadness of the passage of time. 

Now, rest assured, it’s not all philosophically-tinged happiness and tiny violins over at the Rankin/Bass Christmas specials. There’s also a lot of, to use a more modern phrase, goblin energy to these cartoons. It shows up in the character design of everybody from Jack Frost (Robert Morse) in “Jack Frost” to the literal Island of Misfit Toys in “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

That sugar-high energy is also inextricably tied to the complexity and joyful chaos of the animation style itself. As our own Christian Blauvelt points out, “There’s one shot in ‘Santa Claus Is Coming To Town’ where all these kids are playing with their toys in front of the Burgermeister that’s so complex and has so many different types of motion going on, it’s unbelievable.” 

It is not just the IndieWire staff who like to nerd out about Rankin/Bass cartoons — though we do like to nerd about them; they were, after all, the main game in town for “The Lord of the Rings” adaptations through the 20th Century, since the Peter Jackson live action films didn’t start being released until 2001. Since it is a festive week here at IndieWire, we wanted to ask some current practitioners of stop-motion animation about the Rankin/Bass Christmas specials and the foundational influence they continue to hold on our idea of what stop motion is and can do. 

Lumi Baron, the animator and designer behind the delightful stop-motion series “The Tiny Angry Witch” (She’s tiny! She’s angry! She’s a witch!), told IndieWire that the Rankin/Bass Christmas specials have a uniquely handmade feel to them. “The worlds that they inhabit and stories they tell feel like they could exist in a toybox. The puppets are incredibly tactile, and the animation has a distinct jumpiness to it that I don’t think we see as much in many other, newer stop-motion films,” Baron said. “I think one of the most wonderful things about stop-motion is the physicality and tactility of the medium, and the Rankin/Bass animation style embraces this beautifully.” 

Julie Ragland, the executive producer at the Portland-based House Special, which produces all sorts of animated commercials and shorts, told IndieWire that the tactility of Rankin/Bass’s approach also allows their cartoons to lean into their imperfections. “They fabricate puppets in fabrics, like felt and fur, that chatter and that has its own style and charm. ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ adopted this, and I think it really lends itself to that nostalgic feeling you get when you see this style,” Ragland told IndieWire. 

The nostalgia of the Rankin/Bass specials only hits harder the cleaner and more precise CG animation or mixed-format animation gets in our digital age. Ragland said that, especially in the current Wild West of Gen AI videos, stop-motion offers both an even more powerful sense of play and a more grounded sense of truth. “We need to keep making stop-motion to keep the medium alive and to support the artists who breathe life into the puppets and sets. It’s truly a form of magic, and I’m blessed to have this be a large part of my job,” Ragland said. 

And it’s especially powerful as Christmas magic, which is maybe why Rankin/Bass made so many holiday specials. “I think stop-motion is particularly suited for the holidays as these animations feel like little worlds of toys come to life,” Baron said. “The handmade nature, intimate scale of the stories and sets, and in many cases a sense of play, lend themselves to a nostalgia, warmth, and coziness — a little bubble of magic.”