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The Dark Meaning of Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman

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29 December 2017

By Bronwen

If you think that animated Christmas movie The Snowman is a light-hearted and family-friendly classic, you might want to think again.

Illustrator Raymond Briggs has revealed in a radio interview that the film adaptation of his book was never supposed to become an iconic Christmas film and its true meaning is much more sinister.

The Snowman melting at the end of the story was supposed to be a way to introduce children to the concept of mortality- a gentle way of telling children that everything must die, no matter how much we love it.

“The idea was clean, nice and silent. I don’t have happy endings. I create what seems natural and inevitable. The snowman melts, my parents died, animals die, flowers die. Everything does. There’s nothing particularly gloomy about it. It’s a fact of life,” he said in the interview.

So there you have it- the true meaning of The Snowman. Now that you know, you’ll probably never be able to watch it the same way again. Some theories have said that the Snowman represented a grandfather battling an illness. Loss of a grandparent is, in most cases, the earliest experience of mortality that children have.

The Snowman and The Snowdog, the sequel to the original, hasn’t yet been said to represent anything unpleasant so at least we can still enjoy that.

 

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