A brief running time is the virtue of this trite Christmas cartoon, "inspired by the true story of the hymn Silent Night, and the men who created it in 1818," as the credits allege.
The Queen is coming to the Austrian village of Oberndorf for Christmas, luring two mouse minstrels. Blustery Buster looks forward to the food and profits that they can make from the pretty tune written by his guileless partner Chauncey (voice of Phil Hartman). The pair move into the local church,
but the Burgomeister's ferocious cat has been terrorizing all the rodents, and Chauncey survives a chase only through the protection of animal-lover Christina, an orphan waif given shelter by kindly Father Joseph Mohr and choirmaster Franz Gruber. But the cat-and-mouse antics have left the church
organ damaged and unplayable on the holiest of nights. Moreover, Christina is framed for theft by a husband-and-wife team of con artists masquerading as the Queen and her "Uncle Otto," who have been looting Oberndorf's treasures as the proud Burgomeister shows them around. Chauncey can't abandon
the girl who saved him, and sets off alone to free Christina, kidnapped by the villains. Selfish Buster mourns the estrangement by grinding out on his concertina the melody Chauncey had written. Father Joseph hears and adapts the haunting tune for guitar, adding his own lyrics. While Chauncey
frees Christina from her bonds, Buster, who's had a change of heart, baits the dreaded cat on a chase that overturns the thieves' getaway-wagon, spilling their loot in public. The real Queen (voice of Marie Osmond) promises to convey Christina safely to her relatives in Vienna, and at Christmas
Eve services Father Joseph and Franz Gruber present the simple, heavenly hymn--"Silent Night." Buster and Chauncey set off together, vowing to spread the song throughout the land.
The true source of "Silent Night" went unknown for decades, until an elderly Franz Gruber, then based in Salzburg, revealed that he and the late Mohr had composed the piece for folk guitar, after discovering that the Oberndorf church organ was made useless by vermin gnawing the bellows. More than
one storyteller has romanticized the immortal carol's origin, and in 1988 there was a live-action TV special called SILENT MOUSE which posited that the mice themselves had written it. The whimsical notion is taken to extremes of mediocrity in BUSTER & CHAUNCEY'S SILENT NIGHT, a generally
flavorless holiday treat (widely distributed direct-to-video) in which all characterizations feel instantly secondhand. Designs and animation (farmed out to Far East cartoon studios) rate well below "Tom & Jerry," and the role of sweetly innocent Chauncey made a melancholy coda to the life of Phil
Hartman, a comedian and voice-over artist shot by his wife in a bizarre murder-suicide earlier in 1998. Small children, the target audience, may care little about either of those drawbacks, but even they should notice how the cartoon's raison d'etre, the creation of "Silent Night" (reverently
performed by Marie Osmond at the end) is reduced to a mere subplot in a limp mouse tale. Among scattered new songs, only Christina's lament "Things That I've Collected" (music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens) has anything remotely resembling staying power. leave a comment
