Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer is indeed the most marvelous Christmas film ever! It is one of many superb animated films written by a great man named Romeo Muller. (For example, he wrote the classic Christmas films "Frosty the Snowman" (1969), "Jack Frost" (1979), and "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town" (1970).) Rudolph is doubtless his best-loved work. I remember watching the film as a child, delighted and enraptured by the story that it told. Do you remember? Sam the Snowman as narrator (voiced and sung in the performance of a lifetime by Burl Ives); Rudolph the misfit and rejected reindeer; Rudolph's friend, Hermy the Elf, also a misfit because he doesn't like to make toys but wants to be a dentist; Yukon Cornelius, the prospector who befriends them both; the Abominable Snowmonster of the North (whom Yukon, in prospector slang, invariably callls a "bumble"); the Island of Misfit Toys, and its winged lion monarch; and many other characters and story threads. The presentation, interweaving, and resolution of all of these elements is positively Shakespearean in deftness, wit, poetic beauty and brevity of expression, depth, pathos, joy, moral instruction, and the sense that all ends as indeed it should. Grounded in a deep and sparkling love of all creation, these qualities characterize all of Romeo Muller's films. If you seek out his films, you and your children will be rewarded with storytelling matchless in its magic.
