When you type “Grinch” into Netflix’s search bar, the first result is likely to be the 2018 animated offering by Illumination, the folks who brought us wonders like Minions and The Secret Life of Pets 2 (I promise I’m not rotten-cherry-picking). That’s probably where most families’ streaming queries regarding the hairy green hyper-Scrooge are destined to end.

But some brave souls might wander onward to the second option: the live-action oddity How the Grinch Stole Christmas from 2000, starring a barely recognizable Jim Carrey and directed by Ron Howard, a filmmaker whose unpredictableness has somehow become predictable. Though I haven’t seen Illumination’s Grinch, I’m willing to bet that it’s not nearly as interesting as the turn-of-the-millennium adaptation.

Admittedly, the comparison isn’t entirely fair, because Howard’s film is a product of its time. That phrase is thrown around a lot, but here it applies unequivocally. Not only is the 2000 Grinch an exercise in dedication to practical effects and classical makeup and costuming (even if the things being portrayed aren’t themselves classical); it’s also a plain demonstration of two-decades-old social norms and artistic tendencies. Rewatching the film for the first time since my childhood — it’s probably been at least fifteen years, Jesus Christ — taught me a couple of things.

The first is that certain images from How the Grinch Stole Christmas, including a mounted minigun with holiday light ammo and a mildly nightmarish prop dragon, are disturbingly and forever burned into the dark recesses of my skull.

And the second is: they just don’t make ‘em like this anymore. I mean that not in the nostalgic sense. Believe me, I know what it’s like to be captivated by the perceived superiority of films viewed through childhood’s rose-tinted glasses.

Rather, I quite literally mean that the big Hollywood studios no longer make movies that are similar to this movie. Instead, they make ones like Illumination’s The Grinch or, to cop an example from a recent family Christmas film that I have actually seen, Aardman Animations’ Arthur Christmas. That is to say: movies whose colorful, eye-catching visuals are achieved via a slick, CGI sheen, and whose edginess-meters are capped around the “fart joke” level.

The distinction I’m drawing here isn’t exclusive to films centered on the most sacred and glorious of all good Christian holidays. No, it applies more broadly to the category of modern family films: the live-action variety has, quietly, gone almost extinct.

Oh, but now, an elephant enters the room. A question pushes its way to your lips:

“What,” you ask, “about Aladdin?”

Well, the “live-action” label doesn’t quite describe what I’m getting at here, or what makes the Howard/Carrey Grinch such a fossil. The few “live-action” family films produced these days, for whatever reason — perhaps financial, perhaps by popular demand, probably a combination — are typically mired in the drudgery of obligatory CGI.

Okay, it isn’t always drudgery. Sometimes, you get the odd Life of Pi or The Jungle Book. But give me a break; more often it’s Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Beauty and the Beast or The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. Plus, there’s that aforementioned abysmally ugly corporate regurgitation supposedly directed by the filmmaker formerly known as Guy Ritchie.

However, as I said before, I don’t necessarily mean to condemn the current direction. Perhaps I’m starting to. I’d better take off my rosy red lenses.

The purism of Howard’s Grinch, with regard to classical cinematic production design, does not make it a good movie. It’s frequently ugly — as ugly, even, as Ritchie’s abomination. But it’s also a fascinating case study in a very specific mode of Hollywood filmmaking that no longer exists.

Even beneath its mountains of makeup and prosthetics, How the Grinch Stole Christmas remains quite the apocryphal work. While it goes so far as to quote directly from Seuss’ book (and reference the beloved animated television adaptation), it almost completely forgoes what is possibly the most Seussian of all qualities: youthful comprehension.

If I were to watch Carrey’s Grinch terrorize the Whos as a young child (whose demographic was presumably targeted by whoever in the studio gave the project the green light) I would have understood almost none of it. Though the story told here is basically identical to that of Seuss’ book, the film lathers on side-plots and expositional motivation-building, and tosses it all up in non-chronological order with a double dose of weirdly mature, frequently problematic offhand jokes. To put it simply, the 2000 Grinch takes a signature, simple Seussian story and spins it in such a way as to completely alienate Seuss’s primary target audience. Sure, the Minions are pretty manic, but their shenanigans are about as plainly presented as a Three Stooges sketch. The little tykes love ‘em.

Howard’s film half-heartedly caters to child viewers’ understanding and enjoyment, evidenced by some crummy add-ons to Seuss’ carefully rhythmed lyricism. But a majority of this Grinch’s ingredients, front-and-center of which is an absolutely spastic Jim Carrey who makes the diagnostically ADHD Spongebob look like Mr. Rogers, aren’t aimed at the very young. Mostly, they’re weird, cynical, dark, dirty. This is far from a Common-Sense-Media-approved Disney+ show. Instead, the meat around the original story’s bones is a factory mix of ambiguous consumerist messaging and sex jokes. The recipe doesn’t make the movie good, but it does make it interesting — and basically unheard of in 2019.

Nowadays, kids entertainment products might make a sly adult-skewing joke or two to keep the parents engaged. The 2000 Grinch is comparatively unsubtle in its *ahem* mature tendencies; Carrey’s green guy has a foxy love interest (Christina Baranski’s Martha May), and at one point he — accidentally, if it matters — face-plants between her breasts. Yes, a lot changes in twenty years.

Ultimately, the 2000 Grinch’s aesthetic preferences, tonal strangeness, and political incorrectness starkly differentiate it from Hollywood’s modern family-oriented output. If it came out today, do we harbor any uncertainty as to whether its creators would digitally render the cartoonish Whoville? We’re living in an era where studios don’t even bother making human-sized cat costumes. In a 2019 “live-action” How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the Whos would all be motion-captured. Andy Serkis would play the Grinch.

Maybe I’m not pointing out anything remarkable here. I’m just gesturing at the constant forward momentum of time and the technological evolution that accompanies it. Give it twenty more years, or even just ten, and we’ll all look back on those weird, CGI-packed family film offerings. How cute it was, we’ll reminisce, that they took the time to render all of the pretty graphics without even bothering to make the whole thing a virtual reality experience!

I guess, as arts writers, we’re always writing odes to quainter pasts, when effects were practical and white people like me thought Driving Miss Daisy was woke. I just never seriously thought that I’d look back a little fondly, and with genuine fascination, on a whiskered Jim Carrey and a bunch of mouse-nosed Whos. Has my heart grown a size? Nah, I think I’m just getting older.

— Isaac Handelman

‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas‘ is streaming on Netflix.

So is ‘The Grinch.’