Post by The Human Being on Dec 9, 2013 23:23:52 GMT -6
2013 CZ Advent Calendar - December 9th
The Little Mole at Christmas
by Semi-bored torontonian
I grew up without Santa.
Don’t get me wrong, I knew who he was and what he did, but he was never a big deal in Romania, definitely not before 1989. I don’t think he was that big of a deal in Europe either: St. Nicholas is the big guy over there traditionally, and in Bucharest, he came on December 6 and left gifts in my shoes. Santa came on December 24 of course, but looking back at my childhood, I’m always a little surprised by how abstract he was. I still believed in him as a kid, I just didn’t have a very precise image of him. We had some very old paper ornaments my dad had grown up with (still have them actually, which would make them at the very least 60 years old, if not more) - a line of little stout dwarves dressed in red and green and carrying little gift sacks on their backs, and I think I mostly imagined Santa to look like that. But there was no mythology and no ritual: no reindeer, no sleigh, no milk and cookies. Santa was just a puff of hot air, from the lips of a ghost, in the shadow of a unicorn’s dream, and throughout my childhood I was never particularly interested in the material aspects of the guy.
But oh, how I loved Christmas… I loved the feeling of anticipation most of all. I don’t remember ever getting a gift I didn’t like (not from my parents anyway), but there was nothing quite as great as the buildup to it. And it all started with putting up the tree, which we always did on Christmas Eve (we always take it down on the 6th of January). And that’s why I picked “The Little Mole at Christmas” for my Advent Calendar entry: it’s a simple sweet tale about decking a tree for Christmas. And it also features my favorite cartoon character - the Little Mole, or Krtek.
Krtek was created by the Czech animator Zdeněk Miler in the mid-50s and he’s still very popular in Europe (though not in North America, I assume). He was first meant to appear in an educational cartoon about processing flax, but he proved popular enough to get his own series of cartoons which have been produced steadily since 1963 (Miler died in 2011).
What makes the Little Mole so great is its absolute simplicity and good-naturedness. The style is flat (it resembles the UPA cartoons a bit, though, mercifully, it lacks their ugliness), the colors soft, and the shapes simple and curvy. There’s never any dialogue; instead the Mole is dubbed by kids (initially they were Miler’s own daughters reacting to the cartoons). The stories are basic and lacking conflict - instead a sense of wonder and discovery pervades every episode, largely reflected through the Mole’s gentle curiosity and joy. When I saw My Neighbor Totoro for the first time, Mei’s relentless, happy curiosity reminded me a lot of the Little Mole.
Wikipedia tells me this is the only Christmas episode featuring the Little Mole, and that’s actually a great thing. Since the cartoons are all about discovering and interacting with the world, it makes sense that each story should be unique. There’s remarkably little in terms of narrative: the Little Mole wants to surprise his friend the Mouse with a gift. But first he needs to put up a tree, which he initially decorates with fruits and vegetables. But a mean crow makes off with it while the Mole is off wrapping the gift. So the Mole goes off to the city to buy a mechanical tree from a toy store, and after he and the Mouse fumble around a little bit to it they manage to put it up. Then they unwrap their gifts and sing a little song. And the mean crow gets a snowball to the beak.
The cartoon is very straightforward about who really brings the gifts. I guess you can say this takes the mystery out of Christmas (especially since it’s aimed at little kids). There’s no Santa, but there is Christmas - not a phantasmagorical guy on a sled, but simply an occasion to be together. And that’s why the tree is so important: without it the gift would be just a gift - it would be lovely, but not special. The tree is material: it takes effort to acquire and build (and I just love the little delicate details Miler sprinkles throughout, like Krtek wiping his feet before entering the toyshop). It brackets off the best moments of the year in the most visible way, but it’s by its very nature, impermanent: you can touch it, but you can’t preserve it and you can’t consume it. It marks the holiday but remains outside of it. Like a mandala, it’s there only to be dismantled, and the gifts exist only to remind us of it.
Whoa, I got all serious there for a moment. But there’s something very sweet about how the cartoon instinctively focuses on the process - the joy is not in finding out what’s in the gift box; it’s in figuring out how to build to that moment of discovery. Too much energy is often spent on picking out the most significant or impressive object, but really, any Christmas gift is lovely if the tree is lovely.