Santa & His Reindeer Sing White Christmas (2002) is a wonderful animated short/music video, depicting Santa on a snowy plain singing the primary lead while the reindeer provide doo-wop harmonies.

This is first of all cool because the music is by the Drifters, a classic 1953 recording. It is second of all cool because Santa & the doowop reindeer really are a hip group & the animation is never over the top. It is deceptively simple but invested with so many subtle moments that it's fun to watch this short film again & again.

Watch for Santa, with the voice of Clyde McPhatter, juggle his microphone, cue the snowfall, & strut his stuff while God himself seems to be keeping the spotlight on him. Watch that one reindeer not singing harmony, but waiting for his tenor solo, in the voice of Gerhart Thrasher. Waiting for his solo is like waiting to orgasm.

I adore this little film & for a while kept it highlighted in my menu bar to listen to whenever I was feeling kind of lousy, as it cheered me up at once. Search for it on the web; it seems to get posted in yet another couple places each winter.



My delight in Santa & His Reindeer Sing White Christmas induced me to search for more animated shorts by Joshua Held, & another that I lit upon was Teletransport (f2007), a science fiction comedy.

A lonely guy is flipping through the channels with no companion in his life but the fly that circles the bare lightbulb. Suddenly he notes an advertisement for the new home-teleportation device for instant travel to exotic places.

So he calls the number, & awaits arrival of the teleporter, which he plugs in at once. It's range turns out not to be all that great, as the machine will only teleport him from inside the device to outside the device, but always still in his crappy room.

He grows increasingly unhappy then angry with the stinking device, never looking outside the window of his room. If he had, he might've discovered the entire apartment building was indeed taking him to all the exotic places he'd hoped to see.



Alas Joshua Held's short-short animation, though slickly done & clever, has not as yet resulted in a second film as elegantly, amusingly joyful as Santa & his reindeer singing. But his films are always at least worthwhile.

In his music video Bonjour L'amour (2006) Joshua animates the band Mondo Candido as a bunch of hipster chickens or birds in the forest, with the lead singer one gorgeous chick providing the seedy-lounge-act'S breathy vocal.

We're shown numerous leering bird-boys expressing lust & love for her. Anyone who always sort of wanted to get it on with Brigette Bardot, but only if she'd been a chicken, will really like this. But the song is a misery to listen to, & it causes the animation to seem generic tone.


A skinny man attached to his big nose stands with his slap-bass stands in a spotlight, seemingly on a stage, but it turns out to be his living room.

He performs a simple jazz riff, most appealing, & we hear a lovely song in the sweet high voice of a girl we don't see, though perhaps it's sung in the mind of the cat slinking around the room failing to catch a mouse.

The song is actually by E La Luna & very fine it is, in this one-minute forty-second mini-music-video. To be so short, it crowds in several short minutes, especially the mouse squeeking from atop the bass.

It comes to a very charming conclusion symbolic of love triumphant or rewarded for the bass player who had seemed so sad.

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