Jingle Jangle: Director David Talbert
on Netflix Christmas Musical

By Iain Blair

COVID may still be raging, and political, social and economic angst is high, but Netflix’s first original, live-action/visual effects musical — David Talbert’s Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey — reminds us all that the holiday season has finally arrived. And to celebrate, Talbert has created a completely original and inclusive cinematic experience.

The fantastical holiday tale follows an eccentric toymaker (Forest Whitaker), his tenacious granddaughter (Madalen Mills) and a magical invention with the power to reunite their family and change their lives forever. The film also stars Keegan-Michael Key, Ricky Martin, Anika Noni Rose and John Legend, who provides an original song.

I recently spoke to Talbert — whose credits include First Sunday, Baggage Claim (adapted from his own novel) and Almost Christmas — about making the film, the workflow and his love of editing and post.

This was a hugely ambitious project. What were the biggest technical challenges of making a musical stuffed full of VFX?
I’d never done a big visual effects musical film before, and when I started writing this, an executive told me, “Don’t write the budget, write your imagination. We’ll figure out the budget later.” No one had ever given me a blank canvas like that before. So off I went, not realizing I’d backed myself into dealing with one of the toughest possible films to pull off: a visual effects musical, that’s also a period piece, with animation, CGI characters and narration. I checked all the boxes.

I'm assuming you started integrating post, the animation and all the visual effects from the very beginning.
On day one, we began doing previz with Framestore. Then we began to work on the Buddy 3000 robot and started motion capture for the puppet, Don Juan Diego. Those were the biggest elements.

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