The National Film Board ushered in the recent holidays with Noel Noel, which it’s calling one of its biggest productions ever. The 2D-animated half-hour aired four times on Teletoon last month, in both English and French, including spots on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

With rhyming narration – think Dr. Seuss for the bookish set – Noel Noel tells the story of the title character, a billionaire toymaker with an office on the 500th floor, who suffers a terrible curse after mistakenly trying to woo the fairy Beatrice with his wealth. It takes the little girl Zoey, her dog and, of course, a mysterious reindeer to help him find redemption.

While Noel Noel is a further example of the NFB’s hallmark hand-drawn animation, with hints perhaps of Paul Driessen’s style, the project was clearly conceived with commercial potential. It contains echoes of other popular Christmas specials, from A Christmas Carol to How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and the English-language version features narration by ubiquitous funnyman Leslie Nielsen. (Benoit Briere of La Grande seduction fame narrates the French-language version). So far, the Board has sold the show to Teletoon France (no relation) and HBO Latin America.

The project was directed by Nicola Lemay, a Quebec native who studied at Sheridan College and made his mark with the 1999 indie animated short The Star Eater. Lemay joined the NFB French Program’s animation and youth studio the following year, where he has been artistic director and animator on the one-minute Gemeaux-winning Science Please! clips. Writer Martin Barry and producer Marc Bertrand, collaborators on Science Please!, were onboard for Noel Noel as well. NFB heavy-hitter Marcy Page also produced.

Page and Bertrand also produced a 22-minute behind-the-scenes doc, Noel Noel Unwrapped, which features interviews with the chief creatives on the project and addresses animation in general. The doc, directed by Eric Barbeau, is being shown at master classes at the NFB’s Toronto Mediatheque. The interview subjects are unsurprisingly forthright in their praise for the Board’s production system.

‘It’s so rare to be able to work on a film in the way that we’re doing it here – with a group of other animators, where we’re all working together in one place and producing it,’ says animator Greg Duffell. ‘A lot of [other] studios do a little bit [domestically], and then send it over 10,000 miles away because it’s cheaper.’

Page chimes in: ‘For the NFB, we have a cultural mandate, and that’s quite special. It’s really an extraordinary privilege for people to come and work here. The idea is to make something that is culturally of benefit to Canada – to interpret our lives to each other in this artistic way.’

-www.nfb.ca/noelnoel