Anatomy of a Scene: The celestial grace of ‘Walking in the Air’ from ‘The Snowman’
There’s a reason why such generational festive favourites such as A Charlie Brown Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street are popped from their dusty DVD cases on an annual basis, with each timeless film containing all the delicate ingredients to make a potent Christmas treat. Escapist fantasies that toy with magical realism, each film manages to make the winter holiday life-affirming, meaning more than the presents under the tree or even the food on the table.
No film in the history of cinema captures this better than Dianne Jackson and Jimmy T. Murakami’s gorgeous Snowman, an animation that bottles the ethereal beauty of the Christmas period that is too often thought to be lost shortly after childhood. A wordless adaptation of the picture book by Raymond Briggs, the film elevates its source material by creating a universal ode to the purity and odd melancholy of the festive period.
Just 26 minutes in length and designed using pastels, crayons and colouring pencils, The Snowman certainly feels like a children’s drawing brought to life, telling the story of a young boy who builds a snowman on Christmas Eve, which leads him on a journey to the North Pole. While a charming short film in its entirety, it is largely remembered for the ‘Walking in the Air’ sequence, where the boy and his anthropomorphic snowman fly across the sky.
Grabbing his friend’s hand in a frenzied panic, the boy is suddenly scooped into the air to the sound of ‘Walking in the Air’ by the Sinfonia of London, with the orchestral score leaving all its drama the moment the character’s feet leave the floor. For mere seconds, the violin strings leave them weightless, looking down upon the countryside of Sussex, England, shrouded in a haze of snow.
So delicate it feels like you could blow the scene down if you merely exhaled, the sequence seizes that particular festive feeling that is very difficult to allocate, inspiring a sort of wonder that can be shared among several generations. It asks if, for just a moment, you could withhold your disbelief and imagine such a spectacular sight, and indeed, just for a moment, such a feat becomes somehow possible.
Circling the countryside with the smooth grace of a drone, yet far more patience to slow down and take in the sights, the bouncing animation works wonders to inspire such awe, with every aspect of the scenery popping with life. It certainly helps that Peter Auty’s angelic voice makes the entire sequence feel like a waking dream, particularly thanks to such absorbing lyrics as “I’m riding in the midnight blue…We’re swimming in the frozen sky”.
Speaking of the song’s creation, creator Howard Blake told The Times that he wished to create “a symphony that expressed the complete innocence and beauty that we are all born with”. Going one step further, he added that “It felt as though the idea came from God,” with every tongue trill of Auty certainly feeling like some sort of divine message from a higher power.
As if an untouchable animated enigma, the ‘Walking in the Air’ sequence has the weight of a feather and enough emotional force to seemingly lift you off your feet. As far as transcendent cinema goes, The Snowman comes bafflingly close to taking you to a celestial plain, making Christmas feel like an otherworldly phenomenon that can never be replicated at any other time of the year.
