‘An Almost Christmas Story’: David Lowery Believes We Are at a ‘Sea Change Moment’ for CG Animation

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While David Lowery was doing pick-ups for “Peter Pan & Wendy,” nearing the finish line on the enormous film he’d been working on for five years, he was sent the script for a short film written by Alfonso Cuarón and Jack Thorne based on Rocky, the tiny owl, who in 2020 was rescued from the Rockefeller Christmas tree.

“I make so many choices based on just random whims in my life and I just love New York in the winter,” said Lowery in an interview with IndieWire. “And then there was a line in the script that said, ‘This chase scene should feel like ‘The French Connection,’ but with pigeons.’ Those two things hooked me.”

More than anything, though, the original appeal of “An Almost Christmas Story” was making a short, which to Lowery felt like a breath of fresh air and a chance to refocus his energies after making the gigantic Disney feature. The idea was to shoot it as a live-action short during the Christmas season, giving Lowery most of 2022 to rewrite, tinker, and prep with the material.

“By the time we got to the fall of 2022 and started putting budgets together, it became clear that doing this in live action would have been prohibitively expensive and probably cost as much, or more than most of my feature films, even though it was a short,” said Lowery, “And so at that point, I started pivoting towards some form of animation.”

The project evolved in a number of interesting ways. During this time, Lowery got an education and appreciation for what is possible with modern computer-generated animation in his collaboration with creative design supervisor Nicholas Ashe Bateman, the founder of Maere Studios. Lowery is, in many ways, a filmmaker whose heart beats analog, and whose love for stop-motion and hand-drawn animation drove the process.

“I think we’re at a precipice now, technologically speaking, where an artist can leave their fingerprints, so to speak, in a digital work in a way that when CG first became a medium, animators couldn’t,” said Lowery. “Because initially, like with all the early Pixar films, you’re dealing with very anodyne surfaces because technology could only allow so much light to bounce off of the texture.”

A Cardboard World

When the film switched to animation, Lowery quickly realized that hand-drawn and stop-motion animation would take too long. He wanted a handmade feel and a world in which New York City felt as if it were a series of miniature models. As he toyed with what was possible with Bateman with CG, Lowery drew inspiration from his childhood arts and crafts projects.

“[I wanted to] make New York look more like a miniature, and then I thought when I was a little kid, I used to build cities out of cardboard in the basement all the time,” said Lowery. “In my house growing up, we had a box where we would just put excess cardboard because we just used it for arts and crafts all the time. So I I have a deep love of cardboard, specifically the texture of corrugated cardboard. And I just thought, what if we just make New York and everything out of cardboard, and that will inform the aesthetics of everything else, because everything else needs to fit into that world and feel like it’s a part of it.”

While cardboard would be the essential building block, everything that appears on screen in “An Almost Christmas Story” looks as if it was constructed of a material one would have on hand in a large arts and crafts supply cabinet.

“If you look at the Christmas trees, all of the pine needles are little coffee stirrers or twist ties,” said Lowery. “They’re all coming from things that you would just collect to build things as a kid.”

Puppetry & a Stop Motion Feel

Lowery has long dreamed of working with puppets, and initially, the concept for “An Almost Christmas Story” was for all of the leading characters to be puppets, which would then be photographed and composited into the cardboard CG environment.

“We did some tests that were beautiful, but it wasn’t shaping up to be exactly what I wanted it to be,” said Lowery. “And I was realizing I really loved having the flexibility that CG affords us. I love stop motion, but especially in our timeframe, trying to get this movie ready for Christmas, I was like, ‘we need to stay in a digital world.’”

S for the characters’ movement, Lowery used motion capture as a base to start, but then to create a stop motion feel, characters would ultimately be animated on twos instead of ones. He explained, “Movies run at 24 frames per second, and if you’re animating on the ones, you’re doing a little adjustment every 24 frames, but if you’re waiting on twos, you’re allowing the same segment of motion to exist for two frames. So you’re actually only doing 12 sequences of movement per 24 frames, which gives it that stop-motion feel.”

Creating Texture & Painted Backdrops

That stop-motion feel got Lowery halfway to his initial vision. The other key aspect was the sense that the materials were real and tactile.

“I just want to have that extremely believable tactile texture to any sort of digital object in one of my films,” said Lowery. “And that we took to the limit on this with every single thing [in the frame]. I really got to dig into, no pun intended, my love of textures.”

It’s here that Lowery became the biggest convert to CG animation, leaning on animators like the art department in his live-action films to fill the frame with tacile details.

“It use to be that you could only render so much, so it was a much more difficult to make CG feel as if it were handmade,” said Lowery. “Now technology’s advanced to such a place that you can do whatever you want with CG. I see that changing left and right. The ‘Spider-Verse’ films, those movies are pushing the medium forward, because they are using all of the things we’ve learned about CG and 2D animation, every type of animation, and using it to combine it into what I perceive with my eyes as a new form. This is like a sea change moment in media, which is using CG in an entirely new way.”

Lowery points to the forest and New York City backdrops as a prime example. He wanted it to look and feel like matte paintings, with the skies appearing to be hand-painted. And to some degree they were. Bateman and his team did go in and draw them, just using digital tools to supply the brush strokes and texture of paint on canvas.

Theatrical Lighting

“An Almost Christmas Story” allowed Lowery to play into his love of theatrical lighting, and having two cinematographers, David A. Ross, and Z. Scott Schaefer, with vast CG lighting experience, was key.

“David and Zach have sort of come up with a method of lighting CG environments that is very holistic,” said Lowery. “It is much more like you’re lighting an entire city, than you are lighting a scene. In this case, because the city was miniature, each one had a little light in each window, it’d be more like we put a lamp inside of a cardboard box and let that one lamp radiate outward through.”

Lowery leaned so heavy into the conceit of theatrical light that he tipped his hand in the film’s opening. If you watch as the owls, Moon (Cary Christopher) and Papa Owel (Jim Gaffigan), fly through the forest at night, the moon itself is a spotlight.

“I thought, what if instead of a moon, we just had a hole in the sky with a Mole Richardson light back there shining around so the moonlight can follow the characters like a spotlight,” said Lowery. “If you look closely, there’s even a little operator pointing the light as it pans around.”

John C. Reilly, Melancholy, & Music

Producer Alfonso Cuarón encouraged Lowery to rewrite the script and make it his own. His biggest addition would be adding a New York City busker (John C. Reilly) — a role that grew with each new version of the film, evolving into the short’s narrator and Greek chorus playing different Christmas carols in the spirit of Burl Ives in “Frosty the Snowman” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Addressing the audience Reilly’s folk singer asks, “What makes a story a Christmas story?” It’s a question that Lowery would answer for himself over the course of making the film: a bittersweet melancholy, which is most often rooted in music.

“Vince Guaraldi’s music from ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ is Christmas to me, it’s so melancholy and so bittersweet,” said Lowery. “And that has the same tonality [as] the scene in the church with the neighbor in the original ‘Home Alone,’ but even in ‘Christmas Vacation,’ the scene where Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) is in the attic watching all of the home movies, there’s like this bittersweet melancholy that All Christmas stories seem to encompass in one way or another.”

Casting Reilly and his narration would be the final piece of the puzzle. The night before recording, Lowery and the actor stayed up to write the dialogue.

“It was just me and John spitballing ideas back and forth about what this character might say and how he might frame the story,” said Lowery. “You know, looking at it now, I understand the entire process is incredibly organic, but then of course, it also is like the thing that makes it the most me of all the things in this movie: someone telling a story, and using music to help aid and abet their storytelling.”

“An Almost Christmas Story” is now streaming on Disney+, after qualifying to compete for the Oscar for Best Animated Short.

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