Hans Christian Anderson was truly many years ahead of his time since this story about the poor little girl peddling matches on the street being ignored by people hustling and bustling while doing their Xmas shopping offering no comfort or compassion to this needy child truly defined the result of the over-commercialization of Christmas and people losing sight of the true meaning of the season.

This short was nominated for an Academy Award. There will be mild spoilers ahead: The story of the little match girl is one of Hans Christian Andersen's most well-known tales, so the plot of this tale is hardly new. It's been animated several times, but this is one of the better ones. Columbia studio's animation department did an excellent one in the 1930s which is the best one I've seen. This is a close second.The backgrounds and animation on this one are as good as one has come to expect from Disney. The story is told without dialog and has been set in Russia. It's faithful to Andersen's tale. It's bittersweet and the ending can be seen as sad, happy or a mixture of the two, depending on the viewer's perspective. I see it as a sad ending myself.Very well done short which was included on the Platinum Edition of The Little Mermaid. It's well worth watching and most recommended.

For me, Disney's gold generation finished a long time ago, by the end of the early 90's. Disney was no longer Disney after that.This is a precious little short, one that will surely become a classic. Actually, you can say that it was already born a classic. If this wasn't included as bonus material on 'The Little Mermaid' DVD, I probably wouldn't know this until now or even hear about it.This short has no dialog, but pretty classical music instead. Images and classical music are so expressive that they speak for themselves, not unlike 'Fantasia'. As such, this short doesn't even need dialogs. Besides, its story couldn't be more simple to understand and this lack of dialogs makes it a heavier experience when it comes to emotions.This mini-motion picture is based on a tale by Hans Christian Anderson, being undeniably a sad one. I know that Hans Christian Anderson was danish, but I don't know if his original tale took place in his native country. I only know that in this short the plot takes place in Russia.Besides the moving and heartwarming story, this short has got artwork of high quality. The artwork is a successful combination between old and new. On the one hand, its artwork clearly evokes the classic/traditional Disney artwork from the good old times. On the other hand, it looks simultaneously modern and current.I don't know the title of this in my country. Perhaps it has no Portuguese title at all?

If you come into this short thinking, "Hey, that girl looks like Lilo," you aren't wrong. This short is pure Disney through and through, which has its good sides and its bad sides, but definitely gives off a very brand-name feel.The story is a Hans Christian Anderson tale about a pauper girl who finds brief comfort in the matches she's trying to sell until the cold eventually wins and takes her life away--not before, however, she so escapes into her imagination to find comfort, warmth, and love. This is a very good story, and in fact is done very well by the animators. It also shows that even though Disney is making shorts again, they're still sentimental fluff on topics the maker's don't really know that much about.Sure, it's sweet, but it's also impersonal. All the power this short has is really in the filmmaker's use of tropes like the cute homeless girl and the magic warm Christmas tree to tug at our heartstrings, but the film makes no attempt to really give any sense of objective to the works. It's meant to make us feel sad, not make us think or understand. It's sweet, but it lacks substance. In other words, it's typical later Disney, through and through.I do give it a few props merely for the fact that it's not CGI. The Oscar nominated short films this year were dominantly CGI, and will probably be more so as time goes on, so it's good to see that one particular company is maintaining a different form. Unfortunately, that company is also infamous for their sugar-coated reality and sentimentality, so they've managed to keep that as well.--PolarisDiB