Featuring the voices of Brock Holman and Ruby Chase O’Neil. Rated G.

The IMAX film The Light Before Christmas is pleasantly old-fashioned. A retelling of Clement Clarke Moore’s classic poem “Twas the Night Before Christmas”, it has the look of one of those made-for-TV holiday perennials that first surfaced back in the ’60s (Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer comes to mind) because codirectors Nathan Smith and Christopher Robin Miller use stop-motion animation. The time-consuming process involves bending flexible puppets in a painstaking series of poses that, when photographed and strung together, create action.

Bryan Allen’s script sets the poem up with comforting simplicity. Katie (voiced by Ruby Chase O’Neil) and her younger brother Makean (Brock Holman) get caught in a snowstorm on their way to deliver a fruitcake to a family friend known as the Candleman (voice-over veteran Ken Sansom). The Candleman is a kindly, if somewhat eccentric, codger who wears what amounts to a blazing candelabra on his head. The kids don’t seem to mind this flaming affectation at all. In fact, when they reach the Candleman’s cozy cabin, they’re more than happy to warm up with a cup of hot chocolate and listen to the old guy tell the famed story of the visit from St. Nick.

Geared toward viewers of primary-school age or younger—and less than half an hour long—this version features a standard Santa and a candy-cane-crunching elf (both voiced by Miller). When the poem is done, there’s a neat little segment that explains how the film was made. In this age of spellbinding special effects, the approach is almost brazenly low-tech. In fact, if I was going to be a Grinch, I’d say that putting this story on the huge IMAX screen adds nothing of any significance. But why be grumpy? What counts here is that there’s plenty of old-school charm to go around.