Penned by Richard Curtis and helmed by Simon Otto, That Christmas is an animated family story about stockings, snow and Santa and is the first Christmas movie scored by John Powell. It is far from the first animated movie scored by John Powell however, and if you like them then you’ll be pleased to know he treads very familiar ground here. The album’s overture, “Meet Our Heroes”, is a nice exploration of the score’s two main themes. The first is kind of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” by way of How to Train Your Dragon, quite a swashbuckling piece (think also of Pan), nice and strong and memorable; the second is full of warmth and love, also with some echoes of Dragon. Both are in that typical Powell long-lined style – here in the initial presentations also with his customary busy orchestration (there cannot be any other film composer who packs as many notes into each minute of his scores).

As the score goes on, he mostly builds from those same two themes (along with a few more minor ones), but we hear them in many different guises (indeed, sometimes we hear both of them at the same time). The second theme’s guitar arrangement in “Sticky Notes” is particularly lovely. There isn’t a huge amount of direct “Christmas music” on offer – a few bells here and there, notably to open “Snow Arrives”, the twinkly finale to the wonderful, otherwise action-packed “Santa Arrives” – but virtually the whole thing is bathed in a kind of holiday warmth, like the Christmas tree lights being on while the smell of Bailey’s swirls around you (and not a sprout in sight). Pleasingly, many of the cues are long enough to allow the music time to be really developed (not always the case in animation) – none more so than the climactic, near-ten-minute “Searching and Finding”, with those ten minutes containing essentially everything that makes Powell’s music for animations so good. This really is a delightful album of music, for my money the composer’s strongest since The Call of the Wild – so warm-hearted, blessed with a pair of catchy themes, thoroughly entertaining from start to finish. Merry Christmas!

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