12 Movies of Christmas - The Snowman

The 2nd of November 1982 was an exciting day for British telly addicts up and down the land. After months of anticipation and many years of getting by with just three terrestrial TV channels, we were finally getting a fourth. To whet the appetite even further, Channel 4 promised a more diverse and edgy alternative to the usual fare dished out by Auntie Beeb and ITV, and it predictably caused outrage with some of its more controversial material. 

But it wasn’t just about triggering the likes of ever-scandalised moral crusader Mary Whitehouse with sweary new soap operas (Brookside) and 18-rated flicks after the watershed; after all, the very first show that went on air was its cosy flagship game show, Countdown. And on Channel 4’s inaugural Christmas schedule, it premiered a festive delight that captured hearts across all generations of viewers: The Snowman.

I was only four years old at the time, so I can’t say for sure whether we tuned in for that debut screening. But like millions of families across the UK, the warm and melancholy adaptation of Raymond Briggs’ wordless picture book instantly became a staple of our Christmases from that day forward. It has aired every festive season since, and I’ve maintained the tradition by watching it each year after I moved to the Czech Republic in 2009. My kids love it, too!

For the man behind the beloved festive classic, it’s somewhat ironic that Briggs freely admitted that he wasn’t a huge fan of Christmas himself. The famously curmudgeonly author regarded Christmas as “a great fuss about nothing” and, for people like myself who were raised on the animated short film, it comes as something of a surprise to learn that his 1978 book doesn’t mention Christmas at all.

While we may remember shenanigans involving a Christmas tree and a night flight to the North Pole to meet Santa, Briggs conceived The Snowman as a light and airy antidote to the grot of his previous children’s book, Fungus the Bogeyman. For him, it was a simple parable about mortality inspired by one snowy morning he remembered from his childhood in rural Sussex.

Originally, The Snowman featured an introduction by Briggs. We open on a muddy field with a line of bare trees almost silhouetted against the sky. The wind is blowing and we hear crows cawing in the background. Then here comes Raymond, trudging along in his Wellington boots. In his rather grumpy and non-showbiz voice, he sets the mood:

I remember that winter because it brought the heaviest snow that I had ever seen. Snow had fallen steadily all night long, and in the morning I awoke in a room filled with light and silence. The whole world seemed to be held in a dream-like stillness. It was a magical day, and it was on that day that I made The Snowman.

I love this intro. It feels so distinctively British and you can almost smell the earth and feel the bite in the air. Even now, it reminds me of long walks in the Suffolk countryside with my dad in wintertime with a runny nose and the cold nipping at my toes through my wellies. The gentle strains of Howard Blake’s “Walking in the Air” fade in as Briggs carries on along the treeline and the scene transitions to the snowflake-light animation of the film, which does such an amazing job of emulating the author’s original illustrations in the book. 

The film’s animators used traditional techniques with pencils, pastels, and crayons, and the effect is utterly captivating. It looks as good today as it did in the early ‘80s – if not more so, in our age of CGI and AI slop. The hand-drawn style gives the film such a tactile homespun look as you can see the individual strokes of the artist’s pencil and the grain of the paper. It’s understated but astonishingly beautiful, and it looks like a real thing you could reach out and touch.

Briggs’s presence in the original introduction gave the film a semi-autobiographical feel (assuming he didn’t really build a magic snowman as a boy), but the producers felt a bigger star would be needed if the film had a chance of cracking the American market.

Around the same time, the production company had also started working on an adaptation of an altogether more harrowing Raymond Briggs work, When the Wind Blows. The book was inspired by the intensifying threat of nuclear conflict in the early ‘80s and took a few pot shots at the British government’s notorious Protect and Survive campaign, following an elderly couple as they try to make do and mend in the wake of an attack.

Incidentally, a few years ago I used my very basic Photoshop skills to create a mash-up of these two very contrasting Briggs stories:

Luckily, David Bowie was slated to work on the soundtrack of When the Winds Blows with Roger Waters, eventually chipping in with the title song. Reportedly, Bowie was a fan of The Snowman and happily agreed to star in a new intro to help the film’s chances in the States.

The Bowie introduction was a far more glossy affair with the rock star trying on his old Snowman scarf while reminiscing about the snowy winters he enjoyed as a youngster. It’s totally fine and it’s fun to see Bowie doing his thing a few years before starring in Labyrinth. Even with his presence, however, The Snowman achieved only modest success in the States. But its popularity in Japan took off after the release of When the Wind Blows, and to this day there is a huge Japanese market for The Snowman-related merch ranging from toilet seat covers to frozen chicken wings.

Another introduction was created for the 20th anniversary starring Father Christmas (voiced by Mel Smith) and using the same hand-crafted animation as the original film. It’s pretty charming, but it’s Raymond Briggs’ intro all the way for me!

This is probably a good time to start talking about the film itself. While adapting The Snowman for the small screen, director Diane Jackson’s animators were tasked with coming up with additional events to flesh out Briggs’s very slender story in the picture book. They upgraded some tinkering about in a stationary car to an exhilarating motorcycle ride around the snowy countryside, and toyed with the idea of the boy and the snowman crashing a badger’s tea party. 

Then they struck upon a brainwave that would more closely tie the film to the festive season, bringing in the eponymous character of Briggs’s earlier award-winning children’s book, Father Christmas. The author was a little reluctant at first but he eventually conceded it was the right choice, and it adds extra scope as the night flight takes the boy all the way to the North Pole for a snowman’s party hosted by Santa.

To get there, the film launches into its most famous and wondrous scene. Running down the garden hand in hand, the snowman and the boy suddenly soar into the snowy night sky. They fly over the fields and houses, pass over the Brighton Pavilion, spot a breaching whale, and witness the Northern lights before arriving at their destination. This is where Howard Blake’s score also takes flight with the only human voice heard in the main body of the film. Blake had written “Walking in the Air” in the early ‘70s while walking along a beach in Cornwall, and it proved the perfect fit for the sequence, sung with such yearning purity by choir boy Peter Auty.

The rest of The Snowman is great, but it is this scene that I’m always waiting for. Even having seen the film around 40 times in my life, I still get chills and well up with emotion. It makes us feel the boy’s sense of joy and amazement, and I love the way it captures that slightly unreal hush you get when everything is blanketed in deep pristine snow. I’d wager it was this scene that sealed the deal when Oscar voters nominated it for the Best Animated Short Film. Sadly, it lost out to Zbigniew Rybczyński’s hypnotic Tango, which is no doubt a remarkable piece, but not the kind of thing you’d watch over and over.

If there is one slightly sour note regarding The Snowman, it’s that Peter Auty wasn’t originally credited for his stunning vocal performance until his name was added to the 20th anniversary release, and it’s still a common misapprehension that Aled Jones was the singer responsible. This is down to Toys “R” Us, the American chain that took inspiration from The Snowman for a TV advert heralding the opening of its first stores in the UK in 1985.

By that stage, Auty’s voice had broken and Jones was drafted in as a replacement to warble a rendition of “Walking in the Air.” The ad was hugely popular and Jones’s version was released as a single, making an overnight star of the 14-year-old Welsh chorister who found himself challenging the Band Aid charity song “Do they Know it’s Christmas?” and Shakin’ Stevens eventual Christmas #1 “Merry Christmas Everyone” for the top spot.

Raymond Briggs is no longer with us, having passed away in 2022 aged 88. That has added an extra layer of melancholy to subsequent viewings, but Briggs himself had a very matter-of-fact attitude towards mortality:

I don’t have happy endings… I create what seems natural and inevitable. The Snowman melts, my parents died, animals die, flowers die. Everything does. There’s nothing particularly gloomy about it; it’s a fact of life. 

Ultimately, I think this is why The Snowman strikes such a chord at a time of year when many people feel a little maudlin. The boy goes on a fantastic adventure with his new friend, and then the snowman is gone. We perhaps don’t notice the parallels with real life when we watch it as kids, but it gains more poignancy as the years go by and we celebrate Christmas in the absence of loved ones who have also passed on. We become adults and hand the film down to our children, and they to their children, knowing that one day we will be the empty chair at the dinner table on the Big Day. Happy Christmas, everyone!

I also think people hold The Snowman so dear because it is a treasured relic from a time when Christmas viewing was a more shared experience, when everyone in the country was watching pretty much the same thing on their four TV channels. Nowadays it’s not so communal even in a single household; rather than grouping around the one television set, families are now free to watch whatever they want whenever they want on individual phones and other devices.

That might sound like a nostalgic take, but the festive season is a time for nostalgia. It is the one period of the year that we’re allowed to yearn for simpler things without looking like sentimental fools. And it's comforting to know that Channel 4 will be airing The Snowman once again this year, just as it always has, a gorgeous and old-fashioned constant as the world goes on changing.