“The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse” (BBC1)

During the festive days we watched a bit of television*, and we saw two things that made an unexpected juxtaposition in my head: the BBC’s newest Christmas release “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse” (based on Charlie Mackesy’s bestselling—or so they say—book) and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. They have nothing much in common except the mere fact that they both can be loosely regarded as made for children with children as the protagonists of their stories, but that would be pretty much it.

Yet something in them made me think of how one of them did an excellent job to hold a cohesive narrative (Del Toro: chapeau to him, more on Pinocchio another time), whereas the other one lost the plot quickly and entirely, and this fact would make them good examples of what to do—and not to do—with storytelling.

If I got it right (and I may be wrong, because I am no expert on modern literature and cinema for kids) “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse” was created as some sort of response to Raymond Briggs’s Snowman, an absolute British classic of the last four or so decades (although Alan Bennett has mentioned in one of the recent entries of his diaries that “I must be the only one of his readers who found Raymond Briggs’s Snowman too much to take,” and I agree with him here: as lovely as it is, it’s also profoundly heartbreaking). And it does have all the elements of the magic Christmas story that Briggs’s also had—a little boy, who’s eager to discover magic, and the animals who make that magic work. But here is the thing: apart from the fact that the audience sees a protagonist character (i.e. the little boy) in standard magical circumstances (surrounded by animals who can talk and help him in a variety of trials), there is literally ZERO magic in the whole story.

Let me explain: when a young viewer sees a little boy who is alone and wants to find home (the prologue to the “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse”), his or her first question would be: why is this boy alone? Where are his parents or grandparents? How did he end up alone in a forest? Children are practical creatures and they want answers. They remember that the Little Prince lived on his own because his planet was too small to hold anyone else; Kai and Gerda lived next door to each other in the garrets of buildings, their parents grew veg and roses, and Kai’s Grandma told them a story about the evil Snow Queen; Peter Pan ran away from his parents when he was a baby, etc.

One could argue that it’s a silly premise as we never question anything going on in a fantasy world, yet one thing remains unquestionable here, and this thing is common sense and logic: they cannot be destroyed by the author’s will, otherwise the story, however magic it might look, would not make much sense.

That is what happened here: we see how the author is trying to introduce his young audience to the world of subtle symbology (it’s clear for an adult watching the animation that a child going through the forest in order to find his home is an allegory of a wandering soul who is seeking a fulfilment of sorts, and every animal emerging there and interacting with the child is a manifestation of different facets of it) yet this attempt appears to feel artificial and tense. Also, kids don’t like moralising about the “real you” and other empty words from the vocabulary of a grown-up pessimist: those things will come to them naturally, in their own turn.

Whilst the plot of the story was a complete failure, the animation was stunning: I’d say (maybe a bit cruelly) that you can, in fact, enjoy it—if you switch off the sound and look at the imagery without following the plot. In this case, you won’t be disappointed. And it would make much more sense if you re-watch the original “Snowman” in the nearest future.

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* A thing we do less and less often, despite the claims that “we are living in the golden age of tv-dramas” etc.; not that we are particularly snooty (our snobbery is fairly mild compared to others), but we both somehow find it a bit exhausting to engage with so many tv series in a short period of time