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The Snowy Day is Amazon’s beautiful, hopeful addition to television Christmas specials

The Snowy Day is Amazon’s beautiful, hopeful addition to television Christmas specials

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On Thanksgiving, Amazon quietly published its contribution to the Christmas canon. The Snowy Day is an adaptation of the award-winning 1962 children’s picture book of the same name, written and illustrated by Ezra Jack Keats. Odds are you’ve seen the book, or had it read to you. Its cover art, with a tiny boy wearing a red coat and a pointy hat, is iconic. And the book itself is a staple of kindergarten bookshelves.

At 37 minutes long, the animated short has a meatier plot than its 16-page source material. But don’t let the book’s diminutive length short-sell its significance. In 1963, Keats won the Caldecott Medal for The Snowy Day. Critics and educators praised his book as a touchstone for racial representation in literature. Peter, the book’s protagonist, is black, though the book never mentions his race. A 2012 NPR story digs into the criticisms Keats, who was white, faced in the 1960s from civil-rights leaders who wished the book went further into Peter’s racial identity. As Deborah Pope, the executive director of the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation, told NPR: "It was no longer necessary that the book say, 'I am an African-American child going out into the snow today.’ They realized that you don't put a color on a child's experience of the snow."

A visit to an aspirational city block with perfect diversity

The adapted story is still simple: Peter must travel to the end of the block, retrieve the special holiday mac and cheese from his grandmother, and return home. But Amazon’s adaptation builds on Keats’ style of muted representation. This is not a story about one boy, but about an aspirational city block with perfect diversity. On the morning of Christmas Eve, Peter steps onto snow-covered city streets familiar from Keats’ illustrations. Except now, the world moves. Peter’s feet crunch through the snow, taking him through the poetic beats of the book. Along the way, he meets up with neighbors — a careful, even aspirational, sampling of diversity. There’s a Jewish baker, an Arab hardware-store owner, an Asian grocer, a Latino older schoolboy, and an assortment of other characters. As with the the book, race is never explicitly addressed.

The Snowy Day’s portrayal of a diverse friendship circle might play as forced or cloying in less-talented hands, but directors Jamie Badminton and Rufus Blacklock, and writers Ann Austen and Irene Sherman, don’t talk about the importance of surrounding yourself with other cultures. Like Keats, they take an indirect path, showing, rather than telling, what is to be gained from such a life. Those neighbors expand Peter’s life by sharing their traditions.

That’s the show’s most significant expansion on the source material: this is a story about tradition, though it’s hardly told in the traditional sense. When we first meet Peter, he discovers a new tradition of snowman pancakes on Christmas Eve, and his quest for mac and cheese is another family tradition. The Snowy Day’s creators present traditions in the forms of delicious treats, cookies and gelt, tamales and Long Life Noodles. Family traditions are precious, but following a setback, Peter learns they are not to be confused for what they facilitate: something to share with the ones you love. Traditions aren’t the gift unto themselves. Instead, they’re a helpful, though not inherently mandatory, tool for connecting us with others — and not simply those just like us.

The Snowy Day is hopeful as it is sincere

It’s surprising that Amazon hasn’t promoted this animated film, which is beautiful, sincere, and hopeful. So many contemporary holidays specials are too saccharine, moralistically on the nose, or weighed down by nostalgia. It even has its own song, a beautiful a cappella from Boyz II Men, who appear in the show as Peter’s neighbors, meeting to provide a soundtrack to the little boy’s adventure.

It’s a perfect little Christmas gift: a unified world. Every character and home is created with the same lovely collage-style. Menorahs float alongside Christmas trees in the city windows. The snow is spattered with the colors of the rainbow, and so the beauty of this snowy day isn’t in a blanket of whiteness, but the power of a magical landscape to reflect and refract the beautiful, diverse colors of the world around it.

The Snowy Day is available to Amazon Prime subscribers.