Plot: Poky is a little puppy of a litter being cared for by a loving human family along with his adoring mother. As his first Christmas approaches, he makes a new friend and shares the holiday with him.
Breakdown: That title is something else, eh? Was it supposed to be The Little Puppy, Poky’s, First Christmas? Being fair, this is the same name as the book on which this special is based, but…..it just sounds so grammatically wrong.
Anyway, this is a cute little special. It’s Christmas, there are puppies and songs and yay. It’s got a soft and quiet vibe about it, and it’s very much just cute. Poky is considered a bit of an oddball, but I don’t understand why. He’s very much just a typical adventurous puppy enjoying his first Christmas with his family.
Shame the human family members were all tragically killed off-screen or something mid-way through the special.
I kid, but, seriously, the special had several human characters and then they all mysteriously vanished halfway into this 24 minute long special. The only gifts under the tree are for the puppies, too. It’s creepy.
Not that they were good dog owners anyway. These puppies are all under probably three months old and yet they just let Poky wander off into the woods alone and neither notice nor care that he’s not with them. Also, they nearly crush the other puppies under the tree they chop down….
Poky gets an incredible attachment to a random boot he found in the forest that he drags home. Who owns this boot? Dunno. Either someone walked home in the snow without realizing they lost a boot or this is a clue in a crime scene. It takes him forever to drag this thing home, which means his owners again neglect to notice or care that he’s clearly not with them. They also don’t notice he has a giant bright red boot until he’s dragged it into the living room and has gotten mud everywhere, so they boot his boot outside and tell him he can’t play with it inside. So…..he sings about how he wants nothing more than to have his boot inside.
I’m really not going to rag on this too much because he’s a puppy with a boot – it’s totally believable that he’d both grow very attached to it in a short amount of time and that he’d be so bummed at being told not to play with it inside that he’d sing about it.
But that’s okay, because, despite the humans being the ones who told him he couldn’t have the boot inside, Poky’s Christmas gift is being allowed to have the boot inside. Suspiciously, this happens after the family is killed off-screen, so I’m to assume Poky’s mother killed the humans and buried their bodies in the backyard to allow her son the joy of indoor footwear.
Poky’s aforementioned new friend is a skunk named Herman. He becomes homeless after Poky’s terrible now-dead human owners crush his hollow log house with their Christmas tree. As a Christmas gift, Poky gives his boot to Herman as a new home.
And that’s pretty much it.
The art and animation are charmingly simplistic. Everything looks like it’s hand-drawn and colored, but the animation can get pretty rough sometimes (Heheh….ruff.) and there are several instances of reused animation. I’m pretty forgiving of that, though, because it’s a seldom-known Christmas special from 1992.
The music is actually pretty nice and memorable. The song about the boot is very weird out of context, though, and it’s difficult to really click with Poky’s mom’s song about how much Poky delights her because he’s so different when I still don’t get why he’s so different. They’re not bad songs, really, it’s just the subject matter that is off. The song with Poky and Herman was really catchy, though. Best of the bunch, in my opinion.
Overall, if you can find a copy of it (every copy I found was low quality and watermarked, but it worked) this is a really cute and chill Christmas special that I think anyone would enjoy.
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The Anime Madhouse 