How Elf Made the 20-Year Journey from Festive Comedy to All-Time Holiday Classic

The Christmas-movie genre is a machine to fight cynicism. There’s a formula to it, a ritual that provides comfort to those of us on its wavelength and serves as an irritant for those who aren’t. Take a character who’s not into the whole Christmas thing – be it a Grinch on top of a mountain or a big city gal just trying to survive in a small town where a cute woodworker lives – expose them to the delights of the holiday, and change their mind. It’s a trick that’s worked since Charles Dickens, and it keeps working so well that it’s spawned a cottage industry. But that trick can only take you so far, especially if you’re having the kind of holiday that maybe merits a little cynicism. Christmas, after all, is work, even for those of us who enjoy that work, and a little family drama or economic anxiety can make that work absolutely exhausting. In those cases, it’s sometimes hard to find comfort in the predictable rhythms of the old Christmas movie formulas. That means unless you can head to your very own charming small town to be romanced by a handsome volunteer firefighter/amateur glass blower, you need a little something different. Which brings us to Elf.

Jon Favreau’s modern holiday classic, which turns 20 this month, might seem on the surface to be just like a million other Christmas movies that come out of the holiday Hollywood mill every year. And yes, there are plenty of familiar tropes, trappings and tricks at work in Favreau’s story of a human raised at the North Pole who goes in search of his biological father. But look closer at the particular magic in this seasonal staple, and you’ll find a film that’s more than a simple reorganization of the same old stuff. In fact, Elf works not because it’s the same old stuff, but because it knows how to use the same old stuff to make something all its own. That means that, even for the most cynical of holiday viewers, it’s capable of casting a cheerful spell.

That spell begins with Favreau’s very deliberate decision to root his story in certain recognizable holiday hallmarks. The first thing you notice about Elf, in the prologue scenes and the design of the opening credits, is how closely it sticks to the visual motifs set by the Rankin/Bass Christmas specials of the 1960s and the 1970s. Everything about these segments, from John Debney’s bouncy score to Laura Jean Shannon’s costume design, is built to call to mind things like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, those classic stop-motion fables with a clear, often rigid morality and a focus on preserving holiday joys come what may. This is important, not just because it draws in viewers with a clear frame of Christmas movie reference, but because it sets a certain tone for the journey of Buddy the Elf, played with absolute and joyous commitment by Will Ferrell.

Buddy, David Berenbaum’s brilliant script tells us, is an orphan who stowed away with Santa (Ed Asner, one of the best Movie Santas ever) one Christmas Eve, which brought him to the North Pole as a baby. That strange circumstance led him to be raised by Papa Elf (Bob Newhart, perfectly cast), with no memory of a life in the world of humans. This upbringing afforded him all manner of privileges, from being able to subsist on a diet of almost nothing but sugar to growing up in a world where every day is a magical Christmas wonderland, complete with talking animals and a surly snowman.

More importantly, though, Buddy was raised in a world without any real complications. His family never has to worry about money, or housing, or a lack of anything other than the occasional elf amenity that fits Buddy’s large stature. He’s so carefree that, when confronted with the news (as a full-grown adult) that most people on Earth don’t believe in Santa, he calls it “shocking” and “ridiculous.” Everything about his life is a kind of living cartoon, a perpetual Christmas special that has morphed him emotionally and even biologically into a being of perpetual cheer and optimism. Then he goes to New York City.

Transplanting a character like Buddy into the Big Apple provides, of course, tremendous fodder for fish-out-of-water comedy, something Ferrell and Favreau milk for everything it’s worth in the “Pennies from Heaven” montage that opens his New York journey. It’s a study in contrast made more interesting by the Christmas setting, since everything Buddy sees around him suggests a kind of magic just like what he knows back home. His understanding of reality is tested in many ways, but hey, it’s Christmas time in New York City. How bad could it be?

Favreau turns up the contrast dial by surrounding Buddy with a perfectly cast series of mismatches for his outright holiday mirth, all led by the great James Caan as Walter, Buddy’s biological father. A children’s book publisher who has lost any sense of reward from his job, Walter is on the “naughty list” because he does things like take back books from a group of children after the nuns who care for them missed some payments. But he’s not an outright villain. Instead, Caan plays Walter as a man doing his best to mask certain emotional wounds cut by a life that didn’t turn out the way he thought it would, and a family who seems to be slipping away from him.

Walter’s standoffish nature presents a challenge for Buddy, as does his first real romantic relationship as he grows close to Jovie (Zooey Deschanel), an “elf” employee at a local department store who’s “just trying to get through the holidays.” Because of the cartoonish nature of his upbringing, Buddy just can’t seem to understand why anyone would have a hard time enjoying this world of wonders, where staircases move and the North Pole can be reconstructed in the middle of a shopping emporium. Why on Earth is everyone so down?

So far, we’re working with the same contrast of viewpoints that a lot of Christmas movies deal with, right? It’s reversed, in that we’ve got one character who loves Christmas versus a bunch of people just trying to survive, but you can follow the rhythm of this. You’ve seen this movie before…until you haven’t. It’s what Favreau and Berenbaum do next that makes the film a modern classic.

For all its cartoonishness and appetite for a certain level of holiday bombast, Elf approaches its themes with a rather light touch. Buddy isn’t a mindless avatar of holiday joy. He’s searching for a place to belong, doing his best to please everyone around him and struggling with the basic reality we humans must meet every day: You can never make everyone completely happy. The film makes this clear, just as it makes it clear that the New Yorkers who surround Buddy are not exaggerated Grinches hellbent on making each other miserable. They’re humans with hearts and souls and senses of joy, no matter how deeply buried they might be, and the entire cast imbues each role with the feeling that these people, deep down, want to be happy even if they’re not.

Which brings us to the real storytelling gift of Elf, the thing that sets it apart and helps it to rise above the cynicism that permeates so much Christmas entertainment. In the end, when Buddy must find his place in the world and Buddy’s family must learn a lesson about embracing joy, nothing about the situation is completely perfect. Walter sings Christmas carols grudgingly. Buddy fixes Santa’s sleigh and then it promptly breaks again. New Yorkers unite in song, but the villainous Central Park Rangers are still out to get Santa at all costs. Most importantly, though, at no point in the film does Buddy ever force anyone else to change, or perform some grand gesture that instantly changes everyone’s mind about Christmas. Instead, despite their reservations and their hang-ups and their own troubles, everyone around Buddy performs a grand gesture to save him, and find joy themselves in the process. Nothing about it feels forced or fake — or the result of Christmas movie rules that must be obeyed at all costs. In the end, Elf is the story of a sincere, nice man who teaches other people, whether he knows it or not, that their own happiness is closer than they think.

So many Christmas films are as disposable and similar as candy cane wrappers. And honestly? If you’re a Christmas movie addict like I am, that’s fine most of the time. But the ones that last – the ones that find something to say beyond “Isn’t Christmas great?” – are the films that tell us that happiness and holiday joy don’t have to be perfect, that they’re achievable despite our exhaustion and our anger and our family drama. Elf is a movie that tells us we can find joy in unexpected, even compromised places. We just have to reach for it.

Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.