Any­one seen Elf again recent­ly? I have, and although I came late to the par­ty, some years after its 2003 release, it’s a Christ­mas sta­ple in our house. It’s just a joy to watch, with great per­for­mances from Will Fer­rell as Bud­dy the human-who-thinks-he’s‑an-elf, and a strong sup­port­ing cast includ­ing James Caan and Zooey Deschanel (great comedic actress lat­er to star in Amer­i­can sit­com New Girl). It’s just a charm­ing, sil­ly fam­i­ly film but a sub­lime­ly-made charm­ing, sil­ly fam­i­ly film. The direc­tor was Jon Favreau, who is known for films as diverse as rom­com, musi­cal dra­ma, adven­ture and sci-fi, and includ­ing sev­er­al of the Mar­vel Stu­dios movies.

The first script for Elf was writ­ten way back in 1993 by Amer­i­can screen­writer David Beren­baum, with Jim Car­rey in mind to play Bud­dy. How­ev­er, as the project took years to get off the ground, Car­rey went on instead to pro­duce that oth­er fes­tive favourite in 2000’s How The Grinch Stole Christ­mas, and Will Far­rell joined the project instead. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a human baby, inad­ver­tent­ly brought back to the North Pole in Santa’s sack, who is brought up as an elf, and who lat­er tracks down his bio­log­i­cal father in New York. As an “inno­cent abroad”, there is none so inno­cent as this.

While you might assume that a lot of com­put­er trick­ery was employed to make Will Fer­rell look big­ger than his fel­low actors in the North Pole, Jon Favreau favoured cam­era tech­niques and trick­ery to cre­ate the illu­sion. He used the con­cept of “forced per­spec­tive”, along with the build­ing of two sets, one small­er than the oth­er, with one raised clos­er and small­er and one big­ger and fur­ther away. With the two sets mea­sured and lined up, the direc­tor could have one per­son on one set appear to be much larg­er than a per­son on the oth­er set. The only CGI in the film was some snow­ing.

The scene with Peter Din­klage is riotous­ly fun­ny, and is best viewed with­out food or drink in your mouth. The scene is set in the board­room of the children’s book pub­lish­ing house that Buddy’s father works for, under pres­sure to come up with the next best-sell­er. Din­klage plays a paid exter­nal children’s book wun­derkind come to bail out the com­pa­ny with his great ideas. Dinklage’s char­ac­ter, like Din­klage him­self, has dwarfism and the jux­ta­po­si­tion of inno­cence and offence that ensues, when Bud­dy enters the room and thinks he is see­ing an actu­al elf, is bril­liant. For the view­ing audi­ence it is a case of see­ing both sides…and it’s very, very fun­ny, so Mer­ry Christ­mas!