Picture this: It’s Christmas Eve, and a cold one. Your family vacations for the holidays in a rustic cabin that borders on the snowy mountain wilderness, so you’ve decided to venture out for a solitary walk to observe the flora and fauna. You haven’t been walking for too long when you’re confronted by a terrifying sight: a fully-grown black bear! Pause and think, you’ve read about these types of situations before. Caught in the path of any sort of dangerous animal, a hiker should make themselves look as big as possible (unless it’s grizzly, then play dead). You raise your arms above your head, shouting “hey bear! Hey bear!” But the lumbering beast doesn’t stop. It approaches, each step bringing you closer towards a grisly fate. “Hey,” you suddenly hear, in an odd, dopey voice, somewhat akin to Yogi Bear strung out on painkillers. The bear has stopped, and it’s asking you a question: “do you know what Christmas is?”
Nearly every unintentionally horrifying interaction in Winslow the Christmas Bear, buried deep within the bowels of Amazon Prime, follows this general pattern. A low-budget Christmas special from 1996, Winslow is the product of irresponsible animal trainer, Troy Hyde, later convicted in 2004 of illegally trafficking tigers and grizzly bears – his license has since been revoked. He must’ve seen an opportunity for a quick buck. After all, what do you do when you have a trained bear, a mountain lion, a racoon, a fox, an otter, a lynx and a bobcat at your disposal? Make a video, of course! About Christmas? Why not? The end product doesn’t exhibit the criminal recklessness of 1981’s infamous Roar – no one was scalped, after all – but there are more than a few eyebrow-raising moments to make one question the safety of children and animals on-set. In short, Winslow the Christmas Bear is what you would get if shlock artist David DeCoteau (A Talking Cat?!?) got ahold of one of the most dangerous animals in the wilderness.
For whatever reason, the main story is buried within a convoluted framing device far more elaborate than the narrative itself. We open on a magical book flying through the night sky, before sailing into the bedroom of a sleeping child. The book nudges the child awake, and she immediately begins to read its first chapter, “Winslow the Christmas Bear,” with vested interest. Winslow isn’t your normal bear. Because bears typically hibernate in the winter, Winslow feels left out of the yuletide cheer. We follow Winslow as he trudges through the forest, encountering animals and asking them what Christmas is. Each of the animals has a different interpretation of the holiday, and the ultimate lesson is that Christmas means different things to different people. This is a perfectly worthy message for a disposable piece of children’s entertainment, but it’s an awfully slim premise to stretch over 45 minutes. Because the video is comprised exclusively of haphazard nature footage, it feels as if the story was simply shaped around whatever they could get on the day.
The principal – and significant – issue with Winslow the Christmas Bear is that every single one of the animals Winslow encounters are terrified of him. The worst sequence depicts a panicked fox, who spends the majority of their “discussion” running away from Winslow whenever he gets too close. You don’t have to be a licensed animal trainer to recognize when a creature is obviously frightened. Cartoonish voice acting, overlayed onto the footage, works hard to justify the fox’s skittish behavior as “quirky” and “lovable.” Still, the incongruity between tone and visuals is absurd. Even calmer animals, such as the mountain lion, seem actively uncomfortable in the presence of this mammoth bear. The hectic editing necessitated to cover up this obvious issue makes the whole experience incredibly jarring. Presumably, this trained animal was at no risk of harming the painfully nervous child actor who eventually hugs and feeds it directly from her hand towards the end, but that doesn’t make the experience of watching Winslow’s climactic sequence any less nerve-wracking.
Even at 45 minutes, Winslow the Christmas Bear is too boring to fully recommend for the casual viewer. Nevertheless, it has some ironic appeal, mostly due to the strangely impassioned narration and low-effort voice performances. Towards the end, our enthusiastic narrator informs as that “every year, the story of Winslow the Christmas Bear is told to children around the world.” That is almost certainly not the case, but nice try. Later, we’re treated to a behind-the-scenes epilogue that further elucidates the story behind the making of the project. “It seemed like Winslow could talk in the story, didn’t it?” The narrator asks. Well, no. It didn’t. “But we really know that animals can’t talk.” She clarifies. Do children need to be taught this? Again, the message here isn’t awful. Treat animals with love and understand that they communicate in ways that are special and unique, such as feeling and touch. But there are far better, and less worrying, options for short-form video content to throw on when you need to keep your children occupied. It’s best to leave Winslow the Christmas Bear where it is, as a ghost of Christmas’s past.
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