Just after the Tokyo International Film Festival announced the lineup for its 37th edition in late September, an email arrived from Alfonso Cuarón, the Oscar®-winning filmmaker of Gravity (2013) and Roma (2018). He said he would be visiting Tokyo during TIFF for the promotion of his Apple TV+ series Disclaimer (2024), and asked if the festival would be interested in screening a little Christmas film he produced. Would they ever! TIFF quickly secured a venue on November 4.
 
“I hope it wasn’t a big headache for the festival,” laughed Cuarón, who attended a talk show with TIFF Programming Director Ichiyama Shozo after the Asian premiere of An Almost Christmas Story. Inspired by the true tale of an owl who got stuck in a Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, the animated film portrays the unlikely friendship between a lost owl and a lonely girl in New York City during the holiday season.
 
An Almost Christmas Story is the third and final installment of holiday short films produced by Cuarón for Disney, following Alice Rohrwacher’s Le Pupille (2022) and Iain Softley’s The Shepherd (2023). During the talk show, Cuarón explained that this project is meant to show different ways that people around the world celebrate the end of the year. However, the filmmaker also shared his ulterior motive: “Frankly, it was an act of selfishness because I wanted to collaborate with directors I admire.”
 
For An Almost Christmas Story, Cuarón got to work with David Lowery, the American filmmaker of A Ghost Story (2017) and The Green Knight (2021). It was Lowery who proposed the idea of making this Christmas film as an animation. According to Cuarón, “David wanted to recreate the feel of the stop motion that he used to do as a young teenager, using cardboard. He wanted to bring that spirit into the story.” However, stop motion that proved to be impossible due to the time constraints. Instead, they went with 3D digital animation that imitates the hand-crafted look.
 
During the second part of the talk show, Cuarón and Ichiyama, two passionate cinephiles, talked about young filmmakers they are discovering. Cuarón’s list includes Juho Kuosmanen of Compartment No. 6 (2021) and Chaitanya Tamhane whose The Disciple (2020) was executive produced by Cuarón. Ichiyama looked very pleased to mention that Kazakhstani film Cadet, which is playing in the main Competition of the 37th TIFF, was actually Cuarón’s favorite.
 
Cuarón also shared his passion toward Japanese cinema, from legendary auteurs like Mizoguchi Kenji and Ozu Yasujiro to B-grade yakuza films from the 1970s. As for recent films by Japanese directors, Cuarón was impressed with Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Shoplifters (2018) and (surprisingly) Miike Takashi’s Shield of Straw (2013), whose concept, Cuarón found, is similar to Fritz Lang’s M (1931). For Cuarón, “It’s important to see the films of old masters. But there’s a point as a filmmaker that if you don’t connect with the films of new masters, you become old very quickly.”
 
To conclude the talk show, Cuarón briefly talked about his plan after Disclaimer. “I don’t have a next project,” said Cuarón, “As I don’t know how to shoot television, I shot it [Disclaimer] like a film. And I’m not very fast at shooting. So it was a very, very, very long process. Now I want to do a normal-length [work], maybe something very short like 90 minutes.”
 
An Almost Christmas Story will be streamed exclusively on Disney+ starting November 15.
 
Special Screenings
An Almost Christmas Story
Guest: Alfonso Cuarón (Film Director and Producer of “An Almost Christmas Story”)