InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 1

FILM REVIEWS
THE BOY, THE MOLE, THE FOX AND THE
HORSE
Charlie Mackesy, Peter Baynton
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is quite naked in its
ambitions to become the next classic British Christmas special —
The Snowman (1982) for a new generation. While Raymond Briggs’
influence can be seen in both Charlie Mackesy’s book and the
film adaptation he co-directed with Peter Baynton, he pinches
much more liberally, and much more blatantly, from Winnie the
Pooh: from the loose art style which (like E.H. Shepard) tries to
retain the energy of underdrawing to the sentimental one-liners
which don’t just borrow their rhythm from A.A. Milne, but their
content too. The book’s second line, “[you’re so small] but you
make a big difference,” reads suspiciously close to “sometimes,
the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”
Suspicious beyond a reasonable doubt, some would say.
pointing toward emotional caricature rather than any emotion in
particular. Mackesy’s addition to the formula is this: instead of
images, like a group of people or animals around a table or tree,
he evokes emotion bluntly and directly through the little self-help
quotes that solely populate the dialogue.
What’s quite shocking is how untethered these warmed-over bits
of “wisdom” are from any kind of story. Based on the
accompanying documentary, however, this seems to be a point
of pride for Mackesy; he insists that the story doesn’t need a
narrative, that the story is the conversation. But for there to be a
conversation, there must be characters to converse in it. These
four are only thinly distinguished by a single trait — the Mole
loves cake (in a way that’s reminiscent of a different character’s
love of honey), and the Fox is drawn — and all speak in the exact
same voice. Either way, they aren’t having a conversation;
nothing is bridging one inspirational quote from the next, as they
are simply stated without motivation or context. It’s hard to
convey the extent of this, except to say that when reading the
even looser book — which doesn’t even have the setup of being
lost or the idea of some home to move toward — it’s easy to find
yourself wondering if the pages might be in the wrong order.
But The Boy, the Mole is best understood as part of a lineage of
British Christmas adverts: specifically, the style brought in by the
collaborations between the department store John Lewis and the
advertising agency Adam & Eve, which started in the late 2000s
but peaked throughout the 2010s as innumerable similar brands
copied them, making ever so slight variations on the exact same
thing. They are always faintly narrative — the Bear and the Hare
in John Lewis’ 2013 ad centered around the vague idea of
Christmas, just as the Boy, the Mole, and the others travel toward
the vague idea of home — but are primarily driven by sentimental
setpieces, created only from abstracted signifiers
“The Boy, the Mole is best
understood as part of a
lineage of British Christmas
adverts.
It’s no surprise, then, to learn that this horrible enterprise began
as Instagram posts. Little work has gone into adapting it into
anything else for the movie — the book might as well be a bunch
of random posts printed and stapled together. It’s hard not to
wonder if Charlie Mackesy is just as cynical. The ads which his
work most resembles frame themselves as non-commercial in
that they never feature the brand or their products (though they
do tend to feature a cuddly character who will no doubt be
14