my charlie grinch

OK, I love the Peanuts special as much as the next person. But, amid all the glowing reviews and tributes, I have to say there's one thing that never fails to get me cranky about it: the dance scene.

It's the laziest bit of animation in a notoriously lazy era for animation. It's essentially a GIF: each kid doing, literally, one move on a half-second loop, and then the camera just switches between the whole scene and zeroing in on one at a time.

Insult to injury: the "twins" are just reversed clones of that same loop. Further insult: they don't even pan and scan *differently* throughout the segment; they just clone the back-and-forth pattern — several times. I feel certain that the brief (and jarringly unmatching) new dance close-ups for the swingy bridge were grudgingly done at the last minute for a disgusted exec.

The casting of actual kids for the parts? Genius (and still rare). Linus's Scriptural speech? One of the most touching moments in television history. But that dance sequence — to what has become one of the most recognized and beloved pieces of music in our culture — ? Three minutes of lazy inferiority. It's an embarrassment.