Nutcracker Fantasy

There are few stories that are more strongly tied to Christmas than that of The Nutcracker.  It has been impressed upon two centuries of children thanks to E.T.A. Hoffman's original story and Pyotr Tchakovsky's famous ballet.  It's been adapted dozens of times in just about every form of media you can think of, but few of those adaptations could hope to aspire to the beauty and strangeness of of the 1979 Japanese stop-motion feature Nutcracker Fantasy.

Nutcracker Fantasy was made by Sanrio Films, one of the many pet projects spearheaded by Sanrio's founder and former CEO Shintaro Tsuji.  He had already spent a decade turning a failing fabric company into a successful vendor of accessories, novelties, greeting cards, and original mascots to slap upon all of them.   By 1975 he was riding high on the success of the newly created Hello Kitty, and yet he wanted more.  He wanted to turn Sanrio into a worldwide phenomenon on par with Disney.  He wanted a worldwide chain of shops.  He wanted a theme park.  Most importantly, he wanted to make movies, so he used his wealth to create a studio and fill it with as much world-class talent as possible.

It was a bold choice to make Nutcracker Fantasy with stop-motion animation.  Stop-motion is considerably more expensive and time-consuming than traditional cel animation and few Japanese animators (then or now) have experience with it.  Luckily for Sanrio, they had access to an entire studio of experienced stop-motion artists.  The director, Takeo Nakamura, and all of the animation staff came from MOM Productions, the same studio that had spent the previous decade and a half making stop-motion holiday specials for Rankin-Bass.  Their experience combined with Sanrio's generous budget allowed them to make puppets that were more delicate and expressive than anything they had created previously.  They crafted everything from Clara's exquisite little curls to giant, colorful, stage-like sets where dozens of puppets could interact with one another by hand and the results are often breathtaking in their elegance and complexity.

Like most of Sanrio's animated films, Shintaro Tsuji himself would write the story for Nutcracker Fantasy.  While most Nutcracker adaptations drew heavily from the ballet, his version combines elements from the original short story with Tsuji's own original ideas.  As such, it loses all the Christmas trappings of the ballet and tells a story that's truly all its own.  It starts off normally enough, with Clara receiving her nutcracker, encountering a two-headed Rat Queen, and following a spectral vision of her uncle Drosselmeyer into a fantasy world.  From there we launch into the Nutcracker Prince's backstory, complete with a cursed princess, an uncrackable magic nut, a lot of padding comic relief, and a battle that turns a handsome soldier into a homely nutcracker.  The second half is largely original material, and it's from this point forward where the film truly flies off the metaphorical rails. There are dark woods full of strange old men, declarations of true love, and a celebration in a candy kingdom complete with Sanrio mascot cameos and a giant clown.  

Nutcracker Fantasy is full of wild ideas and beautiful visuals, even if they don't always gel together.  There's five minutes of pure nightmare fuel at the beginning featuring The Ragman, a bogeyman who turns children who stay up too late into rats.  While the film is mostly stop-motion, there are occasional moments where Clara will interact with live-action actors via split-screen.  There are a couple ballet sequences featuring the notable Japanese ballerina Yoko Morishita, and while they are elegantly performed they also stop the film's pacing dead in its tracks.  That's not even getting into Akito Wakatsuki's score, which takes some of the ballet's best known pieces and mixes them with 1970s synth and the occasional pop ballad to create something wholly different (and perhaps more than a little dated.)  Taken altogether, it's a surreal, chaotic, and occasionally dark experience, a fascinating fever dream of a film.

Sanrio Films released Nutcracker Fantasy in Japan in March of 1979 to little fanfare.  In July of that same year, it was released in US theaters with a few light edits and a dub created by Sanrio themselves.  It's mostly full of TV and character actors, but it's a surprisingly competent dub for its era.  If it has a weak link, it's probably Melissa Gilbert as Clara.  She may have been charming TV audiences at that time on Little House on the Prairie, but that charm sadly did not translate to voice acting.  In contrast, the late Christopher Lee plays Drosselmeyer (and a handful of other roles) with a whimsical warmth that he seldom got to showcase in his career.  He even gets to sing a couple of times!

Sadly, few people would experience it in theaters.  Nutcracker Fantasy was a flop in both Japan and internationally and swiftly disappeared from the cinemas.  While it would be released on VHS and get the occasional screening on cable television, Nutcracker Fantasy spent the next few decades as nothing more than a strange, vague memory in the minds of those who happened to chance upon it.  It's only within the last 10 years that it has reemerged from the mists of obscurity and gotten a well-deserved reappraisal.  

In 2013, the Cinefamily theater in Los Angeles hosted the first theatrical screening of Nutcracker Fantasy in 34 years, even if their trailer put most of its emphasis on its stranger, more surreal qualities.  Just a year later, Sanrio did a limited re-release not only as part of the Tokyo International Film Festival but also as part of a 40th anniversary celebration.  This re-release was an "enhanced" version, one that excised some scenes, added new bits of digital and 2D animation, completely replaced the voice cast, cranked the colors filters to garish levels, and added a new song by Kyary Pamyu Pamyu at the end.  Personally, I find these edits to be wholly unnecessary.  Nutcracker Fantasy didn't need new voices, looks, and edits to be appreciated by modern audiences.  It only needed to be given a second chance and appreciated for what it always was.

Sanrio Films was in many ways an experiment.  It was one man's attempt to turn himself and his company into a Japanese Disney over the course of a decade, and the results nearly bankrupted them in the process.  Never again would Sanrio be so daring, sticking mostly to television and the Hello Kitty brand that made them big.  Yet that experiment was not a complete failure.  It produced a handful of beautiful, eccentric, and singular animated features, including not just this film but also Ringing Bell, The Sea Prince and the Fire Child, A Journey Through Fairyland, and the Unico films.  Together they form a legacy of incredible artistic vision crafted by some of the finest animators Japan had to offer at the time, and in the long run that is more valuable than any box office total.  Thankfully, Discotek Media has preserved both the original Japanese version and its English dub on DVD and Blu Ray, allowing more people than ever to discover this strange little gem of a film.  Much like Clara's nutcracker, it's not the kind of present we expected but it is absolutely one that deserves much more appreciation and love.