I guess you have to watch such cute little cartoons as a kid to really get the best of them (otherwise my rating would probably be a lot higher out of nostalgia) because if you're watching this as an adult for the first time it will not impress you one bit. Well, maybe only with Boris Karloff's fantastic voice-over work which was badly incorporated into the film anyhow - you can literally hear that this is a studio recording. I'm no fan of Chuck Jones' work either (and still think that he ruined Tom & Jerry cartoons with his poorly drawn animation and weak stories) but he did a decent job here, no less. The story itself is the same old story of evil being evil and doing the evily stuff to spread his evilities around - Grinch thinks that Christmas is only a decoration piece and if he steals it then there will be no celebration, no festivities, no nothing; everything will be ruined so everybody could be as miserable as he is. But he hadn't thought that Christmas is not just a date in the calender or a tree in your house - it's love and kindness. They are bigger than anything else in the world and no one can ever take that away from people. "You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch" song brightens the cartoon slightly and, combined with everything I said, presents it as a "not too bad" piece of cinema history.
