Gurlyndrobb
While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.
Sarita Rafferty
There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.
Cheryl
A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.
Christmas-Reviewer
BEWARE OF FALSE REVIEWS & REVIEWERS. SOME REVIEWERS HAVE ONLY ONE REVIEW TO THEIR NAME. NOW WHEN ITS A POSITIVE REVIEW THAT TELLS ME THEY WERE INVOLVED WITH THE MOVIE. IF ITS A NEGATIVE REVIEW THEN THEY MIGHT HAVE A GRUDGE AGAINST THE FILM . NOW I HAVE REVIEWED OVER 300 HOLIDAY FILMS. I HAVE NO AGENDA.Cricket on the Hearth is a Christmas special produced by Rankin/Bass, and based on the story of the same title by Charles Dickens..A talking cricket helps an impoverished toy maker and his daughter, who has been blinded after hearing her beloved is lost at sea. It is book-ended by live-action segments hosted by Danny Thomas.Not a bad special but this 1967 Television special has too many songs and none of them are very good. What does work is Television Icons Marlo Thomas and Danny Thomas bring life into an otherwise lifeless script.
TheLittleSongbird
Cricket on the Hearth oddly enough does have some things that are good. The stylised painting style visuals during the songs were quite nice, far more appealing than the animation style of the rest of the movie(though understandably some may find it jarring). Danny Thomas does an excellent job, the voices are done with professionalism and the moments with Bertha and her father are lovingly tender, which I did love. Unfortunately, the rest of Cricket on the Hearth I did find horrible. I found the songs unmemorable and with no sense of life at all and some even don't have anything to do with the story or what's going on in the scene. The writing has no charm and heart and the more humorous parts are very unfunny. The characters are shallow, the only character with some essence of likability is Bertha, the cricket is annoying and mean-spirited and the villain is similarly insipid. The animals also had no relevance to the story. The animation for much of the special has a lot of dull colours which make the already uninteresting backgrounds all the more drab. The character designs are equally unappealing with everybody drawn in a deflated way. But it was the story that fared worst. If I had not known that Cricket on the Hearth was a loose animated adaptation of A Christmas Carol I honestly would never have known it was to do with Christmas. Instead of warming my heart or amusing or moving me, it bored and depressed me with its often mean-spirited(murder, kidnapping), all-over-the-place and weird storytelling. Bertha and her father have some tender moments, but they are not enough to inject any kind of warmth. Those of her and Edward were the kind that we have seen so many times before and explored much more convincingly, it was all too bland and clichéd. All in all, horrible save a few things, one of the worst Rankin/Bass have ever done. 3/10 Bethany Cox
evening1
This wisp of a Christmas tale can't compare to Dickens's "Christmas Carol" but it was probably worth the 45 minutes or so my 8-year-old and I devoted to it on Christmas Eve.My little guy wasn't thrilled about having to sit through this old chestnut -- this 1967 piece seemed far too old-fashioned with its smarmy song interludes, shallow characters, and annoying cricket narrator. But I found this trifle a relatively pleasant retreat to the type of entertainment I knew when I was 11.This is a fairy tale for sure -- we had to rewind to actually get how the heroine went blind -- yep, it was really from shock that her beau had been lost at sea. Yet it's a fairy tale that seemingly ends on a saddish note. She doesn't regain her vision after her love miraculously returns -- or does she? (We didn't care enough to rewind to see if we somehow had missed that information.)The daughter's offer of love and inclusion to a crochety old miser ends this story on a charitable note that seems a faint echo of Dickens's far more worthy yuletide work.Not exactly a Bah Hum-BUG here, but close -- ho, ho, ho!
bchalker
What an awful piece of Christmas special history. Songs are horribly depressing (as well as the storyline). Animation is the worst of all R/B creations (IMO). Let's forget it was made, shall we?
