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Etch a sketch digital12/20/2023 ![]() ![]() Santa warns that Walter is on “the naughty list”, but Buddy is undeterred from journeying to New York City via an ice floe, a Candy Cane forest, the Lincoln Tunnel and a lot of yadda-yadda-ing in between. ![]() That doesn’t make Buddy an easy fit, however, with his enormous size and his woeful inefficiencies as a toymaker, with production that far exceeds what a normal human could do in a day but is 915 Etch A Sketches off the pace of an actual elf.Īnd so, inevitably, Buddy asks questions about his roots and learns that his one surviving parent, Walter Hobbs (James Caan), is a curmudgeonly children’s book publisher who works in the Empire State Building. The picture-book framing casts Bob Newhart as Buddy’s adoptive father and the film’s narrator, greeting the audience with a low-key “Oh hello, you’re probably here about the story.” Having slipped into Santa’s bag as a toddler, Buddy is the first human to set foot in his workshop, a crossing-the-streams situation that recalls Monsters, Inc from two years earlier, only the North Pole proves more accommodating. When a gaggle of New Yorkers gather to sing Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town on Christmas Eve, they may as well be crying “uncle”. He treats every scene like Christmas, rapaciously tearing into every comic opportunity given to him while bringing the other characters on board, one by one, through his infectious energy. ![]() But his casting – and, helpfully, the impeccable casting of the entire film – has turned this agreeable fish-out-of-water comedy into something close to a holiday classic 20 years later. It’s not quite right to say he was born to play Buddy, an exuberant orphan raised in Santa’s workshop in Elf, because he was also the only conceivable person to play Ron Burgundy in Anchorman or Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights. ![]()
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