William Joyce’s illustrated books for children are marvels of wit and wonder, rendered in softly shaded colors with an art-deco flair. In books like A Day with Wilbur Robinson and Santa Calls, winsome dinosaurs wear miniature fezzes on their tiny heads; a roly-poly Santa, complete with monocle (the better to read the names of good little boys and girls), looks as if he’s just stepped off a ’30s Christmas card; and modes of transport include Buck Rogers-style spaceships and locomotives of the sort Superman could stop with his bare hands.
Rise of the Guardians is adapted from Joyce’s book series The Guardians of Childhood. But the occasional Joycean touch aside, it bears so little resemblance to the look and feel of its source material that it ought to be considered an entirely different beast.
The story is convoluted and overly complicated: In the opening, we meet Jack Frost (voiced by Chris Pine), a skinny nonmortal with a shock of silvery Rod Stewart hair. Frost has been given a gift by the moon — he can create snow and ice crystals with a wave of his crooked staff — but he’s been around for 300 years, and he still doesn’t know who he is or where he came from.
Meanwhile, a Santa Claus type known as North (Alec Baldwin) — he’s heavily tattooed and speaks with a thick Russian accent — discovers that the Bogeyman, aka Pitch (Jude Law), is alive and well and turning the dreams of children everywhere into nightmares, zapping any sense of wonder right out of the little tykes.