18 Lesser-Known Stop-Motion Christmas Gems To Enjoy This Holiday Season

Last Year’s Snow Was Falling (1983) is a wonderfully bizarre Soviet short about a shiftless drunkard who tries to chop down a New Year tree in a magical forest. The film was directed by Aleksandr Tatarskiy, who later co-founded Pilot Studio, Russia’s first non-state run animation studio after the fall of the Soviet Union. This film’s absurdist humor and clay-animated transformations made it a cult classic when it was shown on tv, but the weird jokes raised censors’ suspicions that it contained “encoded messages to foreign intelligence.”
Stop-motion animation and the holiday season go hand in hand, thanks to the Rankin/Bass tv specials and feature films like The Nightmare Before Christmas.
I can’t get enough of the Hey Mister, Let’s Play! cartoons, a series about two playful bears created by Czech animation genius Břetislav Pojar. These relentlessly creative films were shot on glass with a down-shooting camera, with textures that pop off the screen. The episode How They Went to Bed (1967), directed by Miroslav Štěpánek, contains a great sequence set in a winter wonderland. This scene is full to bursting with the series’ trademark whimsy and loopy transformations (Thanks to Toadette for the print and English subtitles.)

If you’re craving more Czechoslovakian animated bears, here’s Stromček (1973), the Christmas episode of the obscure but endearing Miláčik series, all about a curious little bear and his kindly grandma. The soft textures and quirky movements give this sweet little film so much hand-crafted personality.
— Cartoon Study (@CartoonStudy) December 22, 2022