Technically, “Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny” does deliver on it’s promise. Santa Claus does indeed get visited by a bunny, who comes bearing ice cream. However, this film isn’t nearly as interesting as it sounds. I thought going in that it’d be a fun failure. I didn’t expect to watch an hour-long production of “Thumbelina”, with a wraparound involving Santa and an “Ice Cream Bunny”. That’s right, this film is secretly about “Thumbelina”. More on that later.
Let’s start with how Santa got stranded in Florida. A few weeks before Christmas, he took his sleigh out for a trip around the world to see who’s been naughty and nice. I thought he could see us at all times and deduce this, but I guess not. When arriving in Florida, his sleigh gets stuck in sand and the reindeer abandon him for the North Pole. He doesn’t blame them, as he feels they couldn’t handle the heat. Getting past the fact that his sleigh has no issues of driving through mounds of snow, I find it peculiar that magical flying reindeer can’t stand a little heat.
Santa calls on the help of some local children to pull out the sleigh. This warrants a random montage of them playing, then freeze framing right before the climactic finish of their task. Once their name is called, their task can resume to it’s finish before they go help Santa. They apparently raid a local zoo and bring forth dozens of animals to try and pull the sleigh out of the sand. When that doesn’t work, Santa tries digging himself out before giving up after a minute. With laziness like that, he deserves to be stranded.
With no foreseeable escape, Santa decides to tell the kids the story of “Thumbelina”. The tenuous link is supposed to be that she overcame obstacles and escaped her planned marriage to a mole (seriously, “Thumbelina” is a weird story), which relates to Santa’s current plight. I believe the real reason was they didn’t film enough footage of “Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny”, so they threw in a lousy production of “Thumbelina” to pad out the time. That story, by the way, takes up an hour of the film’s running time. Santa and the “Ice Cream Bunny” are stealing Thumbelina’s spotlight!
How the story of “Thumbelina” is told is baffling. It starts with Santa telling the story to the kids, only to cut to a random teenage girl wandering around an amusement park. She eventually stumbles into what appears to be a play of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic tale, only for it to be an audio recording of it. We, however, get to see a live action film of it. Which begs the question why didn’t they just immediately cut to the film?
There’s not much to go over in the “Thumbelina” story. It’s got subpar acting and hysterically awful costumes that border on nightmare fuel. It moves at a snail’s pace and somehow takes the strange yet fascinating story and makes it dull as dirt. It’s possible the oddity of the wraparound could’ve made for a fun failure viewing, but this telling of “Thumbelina” kills that notion.
I obviously didn’t have high hopes for “Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny”, but at least thought I’d have a good time watching it. In the sense that I have fun watching “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”. That’s a terrible film, but it’s at least bonkers enough that you can laugh at it. This film barely delivers on it’s promise and, once it gets to the “Thumbelina” story, becomes a chore to watch.
Final Rating: F