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clarktooncrossing · 1 year ago

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Giraffe's Eye View: Christmas Specials Special (2023) | A Christmas Special: Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir

Chestnuts are roasting on an open fire. Jack Frost is nipping at your nose. Mom and dad can hardly wait for school to start again. All the dogs in the neighborhood somehow learned to bark Jingle Bells in sync. Yet retail workers are still more annoyed with Mariah Carey. Snow is getting shoveled, tossed, and formed into sentient beings leading parades without permits. It makes for an excellent distraction as the Krampus abducts children for bad behavior. Fruitcake is exchanged only to find its permanent home in the garbage. Terrorists have hijacked the Holiday office party right before your boss can give you a Jelly of the Month Club membership as your bonus. And of course, the Turducken has returned to wreak its fiery vengeance upon an unsuspecting world! If all this doesn’t put you in the Christmas spirit, perhaps these following Holiday specials will!

Greetings people of today and robots of tomorrow! It is I, Santa Clark, your geeky giraffe friend with a deep love of Christmas! My obsession for the yuletide is rivaled only by Maleficent’s hatred for it, which is saying a lot considering she once teamed up with Mad Madam Mim to kidnap the literal Spirit of Christmas. Yes, that really happened. I know this due to my annual pilgrimage to the Island of Misfit Specials, home to obscure or nerdy festive media ranging from movies, TV episodes, and comics. It’s no easy journey. Constantly I find myself confronted by sinister snowmen, genocidal gingerbread men, and worst of all, crappy commercials. Getting stabbed in the foot by a candy-cane wielding cookie is one thing, but I swear I’ve seen that ad for Wilbur’s White Elephant Gift Emporium more times than I’ve seen Miracle on 34th Street! Sometimes at night I catch myself reciting that jingle. Wilbur’s White Elephant Gift Emporium: Where Christmas meets Convenience! Huh, maybe Maleficent had a point.

Nah, my deep-rooted appreciation for this time of year can weather even the most moronic marketing! It helps that most of the merry media I’ve seen have put me in the perfect Holiday mood! Examples include the time a Ninja Turtle found himself trapped in a truck full of stollen toys, a drunk department store Santa stumbling onto a wish-granting magic bag, Big Bird nearly becoming a popsicle, Gwenpool waking up in a world where Galactus took the place of jolly ol’ Saint Nicholas, a terrifying tree stump trying to slaughter some saps over a stupid ship war, and the year when Death gave the Little Match Girl the greatest gift of all. Needless to say, I thought I had seen it all. That is, until I took my friends on a trip to the Island, tasking them to find me new, strange, seasonal specials to review! Some of them were fair, finding me festive favorites as comforting as coco in front of the fireplace. Others were fiendish, wanting to feed off my misery like Gremlins after midnight. Regardless of how naughty or nice my companions were, I’ve compiled all of their suggestions into a makeshift advent calendar! So stay tuned everyday until Christmas to see how badly my buddies can shred what little sanity I have left.

On the fifth day of Christmas, my buddies gave to me...

I am a geek. Yes, surprising innit? There’s a lot of dorky information about various things that live in my head rent free. Miraculous Ladybug is not one of them. My only exposure to this show has been the copious amount of fanart littering deviantART, otherwise I have no absolutely no connection to it. So naturally you can imagine my confusion when my companion Fluffy (xXFluffyPachirisuXx) asked me to check out the episode A Christmas Special: Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir. The confusion only grew after reading that title. Were the writers being paid by word? Did they think fans would be confused if it was simply called A Miraculous Ladybug Christmas? Why not go the extra mile by adding ‘Dawn of Justice’ or ‘Giant Monsters All-Out Attack’? I don’t know and I don’t care, for this title is très magnifique! Seriously, somebody give these peeps an award just for how ridiculously long that is! No kidding, this is actually how it’s listed on Netflix. Disney+ had the common sense to shorten it to Santa Claws, a more fitting name as you’ll soon see. Just a reminder, I’ve never seen any other Ladybug adventures before, so forgive me if I get a few details wrong.

We open with the titular Ladybug in her civilian identity Marinette (Cristina Valenzuela), passing out treats in her parents’ bakery while singing one of five subpar songs sprinkled throughout this episode. The first one is about Marionette's secret love for her friend Adrien (Bryce Papenbrook), her hidden desires on par with the title in terms of subtlety. Or at least, I presume that’s what she’s singing about. Much like a majority of the dialogue, it’s delivered so quickly that I barely have any time to register what was said. Was The Flash the vocal coach on this production? My only guess as to why everyone’s reads are so rapid is due to this show being Parisian, meaning they have to dub everything in English later. With French being the fast-paced language that it is, it’s no wonder all the characters are speaking at sixty syllables per second. I’ll have to go to a hospital when this is over due to how badly I suffered whiplash.

Time to slow down is given when we are introduced to Adrien, having a notably less joyeux noel at home. His mom has recently passed away and his dad is too busy sulking in his office to mourn alongside his son. Realizing he’d rather not spend Christmas Eve alone in a mansion, Adrien activates a Sailor Moon transformation, becoming Cat Noir to spend Christmas Eve alone outside. Personally I would’ve just put on Die Hard, especially if it meant I didn’t have to go out in that skin-tight supersuit. People say Black Cat’s costume is senseless, but at least hers doesn’t come a pointless tail in the back. Bad guys must stomp on that thing all the time! It’s impressive how impractical this kid’s suit is. My mocking remarks can be applied to Mary’s form-fitting ladybug onesie too, having switched into it to find her runaway romantic interest. She finds him soon enough, having calmed down long enough to befriend a mysterious mall Santa. Aw, that’s nice. Ladybug proceeds to pummel the crap outta the old man. Our hero, folks! She assumes the jolly stranger is secretly under the control of their enemy, Hawkmoth (Keith Silverstein), Adrien protesting that wasn’t the case. Ironically, it’s only after Bugbutt assaults this kindly elder that he’s mutated into a monster by the aforementioned fiend.

Gotta give Hawkmoth credit, his corrupted Claus looks more like the Grinch than Illumination’s iteration did. Now it’s up to the combined might of Cat and Bug to stop Santa Claws before he does something evil or something. All he ends up doing is riding around repeating the same song before having his reindeer eat some spoiled millennial’s presents. That twisted bastard! His sled can fly, yet the story goes nowhere, that being the major issue I have here.

Plot points are presented, then never given any proper conclusion. Mary gives Adrien a gift, he never tells her thank you. Adrien runs away, returning with some stranger dressed like Père Noël and everybody’s apparently cool with it. Hawkmoth corrupts the Claus, it’s fixed almost immediately. All that time spent coming up with that confusing title couldn’t have been spent streamlining the story? I know you folks only have eighteen-minutes but ease up on the gas please! Twenty-second Christmas commercials have better pacing, most of them delivering payoffs to whatever stories they started. Having said all that, there are aspects I liked. The characters themselves seem likable, I dig the idea of setting a superhero series in Paris since not a lot take place outside the States, and the animation style I thought would be awkward actually worked well for the action sequences. Overall this wasn’t bad, but it didn’t miraculously turn me into a fan. Maybe what I need are some different teenagers with attitude.