'Arthur Christmas' has a warm heart

A corporate-style monolith corners the market on holiday retail, cruelly displacing its outmoded workforce and crassly insisting that any individuals who fall through the cracks are part of the cost of business.

But 99 percenters don't need to start an Occupy North Pole movement over Arthur Christmas, the animated comedy that shows how Santa Claus manages to deliver all those presents in a modern global market.

This pleasant holiday treat from Aardman, the British animation outfit behind Chicken Run and Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, has the old-fashioned spirit of Christmas at heart, spinning a snowflake-light tale with warmth, energy and goofy humor.

The upbeat, lanky younger son of Santa Claus, Arthur (voiced by James McAvoy) desperately wants to contribute to the family business but is a clumsy bumbler assigned to a job where he can do the least harm: answering children's letters to the man in red.

The glory goes to his dad (Jim Broadbent), the latest in a long line of Santas, who has become a dotty figurehead as older, bolder son Steve (Hugh Laurie) revamps the sleigh-and-reindeer method with a mechanized operation.

Yet after a single present goes awry, leaving one little girl in Britain just hours away from awaking to a joyless Christmas, Steve shrugs it off as an acceptable rate of error, while drowsy Santa heads off to sleep alongside Mrs. Claus (Imelda Staunton).

Arthur, the only one in the family who understands the meaning of the season, can't stand the thought of a child missing out.

He and loopy Grandsanta (Bill Nighy) set off in the original old reindeer-pulled sleigh to deliver the wayward present.

This is Aardman's first digital 3-D feature, and while the images are fine, it amounts to another case of unnecessary 3-D presentation from Hollywood. The extra dimension adds little.

Yet it's nowhere near as unnecessary as the Justin Bieber music video of Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town that precedes the movie, in jarring 3-D.

Hearing Bieber's take on the holiday chestnut in the end-credits is more than enough.