Movie Thoughts: Annabelle's Wish (1997)

• Released: 21 October 1997
• Directed by: Roy Wilson
• Running time: 54 min
• Rating 3/5

Synopsis

A calf named Annabelle wishes to fly like one of Santa's reindeer.

My Thoughts

I had no idea what second Christmas movie to review this year. I considered Niko/The Flight Before Christmas and Rudolph and the Island of Misfit Toys. Ultimately, though, this was my final pick, as DuckyWorth brought it up in a Discord chat and I suddenly got memories to seeing this movie a couple of times in Austria during the holidays. I doubt I’ll be doing a third Christmas review this year, so you’ll probably have to make do with this! Let’s take a look at Annabelle’s Wish.

Overall I just thought this was a simple but rather heartfelt story. It’s not too complicated and doesn’t bother with too many sideplots or anything. It’s also rather short, but it doesn’t really harm the overall product. For what it is, I think this is a fine story.

Our characters are basic, but still do their jobs well enough. Annabelle is your basic wide-eyed kid who loves to explore the world. She’s got a good heart and it’s nice to see her have her own hopes and dreams, even if she of course chooses friendship over her biggest personal wish. This just makes her a rather strong character. There’s Billy, who is mostly scared and shy at first, but through his friendship with Annabelle learns to overcome his fears and be more open and to stand up for himself. He was a good deuteragonist, and it was nice to see him grow up into a nice and stable life with a loving wife. There’s more characters, but a lot of them are just one-offs or comic relief. I really do not have much to say about them, to be honest.

Our main villain comes in the form of a selfish woman who wants custody over Billy. I honestly thought she was the weakest aspect of the movie. She didn’t have a threatening presence or anything. She was just kinda there and just acted like your generic bad guy. I get that they wanted an antagonist for more conflict, but honestly I feel like she wasn’t too necessary for the movie. If this had just been about a nonverbal boy and him overcoming his fears through his friendship with this calf, I’d have been content as well.

The animation is a bit dated and not the best, but still pretty good. It’s miles above Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer: The Movie, for example, as characters stay on-model more often and the mouth movements are a bit better. It’s still far from being actually great, but for what we have, it’s decent.

The other visuals are kinda neat, too. I like a lot of the simple character designs. Annabelle in particular has a nicely balanced one that’s definitely cute. The other animals and humans look kinda good, too. My only exceptions to this rule are the pig and the dog, which have some kind of human mouth-and-cheeks thing going on. I don’t know who thought of that, but it looks really distracting and kind of poorly designed. Don’t design your animals with human mouths like this, people.

The backgrounds are nicely done and really get the winter-y holiday feel across, so I greatly enjoyed those.

The music was nothing special, but it got the point across. I liked some of the tunes.

Finally I’d like to address the fact that this movie does seem to slightly indicate that being nonverbal is something to be overcome. I’m not sure what to think of this. Some people just don’t speak, and I honestly don’t know if we should be possibly pushing the message that it’s something that has to be fixed. It wasn’t fully present here, but I just feel like I have to address it since I did get slight mixed feelings about it. 

While nothing special or groundbreaking, Annabelle’s Wish is a cute simple short Christmas movie that deserves at least a look if you’re interested. It has good main characters, pretty good visuals and a nice main theme of selflessness and caring for others.

This was a rather short one, since I don’t have much to say about it, but I had fun writing this and seeing the movie in full for the first time after catching only glimpses of it on Austrian TV a couple of times. Happy holidays to you all. I may do another review this month, but, again, I doubt it’ll be Christmas related! See you around.