Mathmagic Brought Them Together
Tags: Movies, Math, Christmas, Kids, Education

Tori Reeder, Andrew Fiss, and Laura Kasson Fiss

Does creativity belong to the arts or the sciences? This is not a question we expected from a holiday movie. Netflix’s 2020 Christmas movie Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey is a musical about an inventor/toymaker named Jeronicus who rediscovers the magic of STEM.

After Jeronicus’s apprentice Gustafson (Keegan Michael Key), steals his prized toy (an automated Don Juan doll played by Ricky Martin), Jeronicus loses his passion for inventing. Years later, an older Jeronicus (Forest Whitaker) meets his granddaughter Journey (Madalen Mills), and, through her own passion for inventing, she affects Jeronicus’s Scrooge-like transformation. On the surface, this movie seems to be your standard holiday fare. However, when we start to unpack its presentation of the magic of inventing, we begin to see a question emerge: Does creativity belong to the arts or to the sciences?

Inventing is, of course, difficult to represent in a movie. The inventing process can be difficult, time-consuming, solitary, and slow. In its reliance on rule-based problem-solving, it’s often seen as connected to STEM (science, technology, engineering, math), which has a complicated history of media representations. But dramatizing inventing, as in Jingle Jangle, shows how there’s something more, something more artistic in inventing, too. The movie ultimately suggests that creativity is the domain of both the arts and STEM — and it’s through math!

Jingle Jangle presents mathematical concepts, equations, and problem-solving in a whimsical manner. There are instances where both Jeronicus and Journey solve a technical problem by imagining numbers and variables, highlighted and floating in the air in front of them. Is this an extension of the magic that brings the doll to life? Is it merely the manifestation of the inventors’ mental mathematics? Or is it some combination, suggesting that math is always magical?

“Mathmagic” has been an explicit feature of children’s media since the Space Race. Cold War children’s movies, like Donald in Mathmagic Land (1959), show characters engaging in math as a way of doing STEM outreach. If children see the magic behind the math, they seem to say, then perhaps those children will be more open to STEM. More recent children’s movies, like Moana (2016), have shown characters doing math but they don’t always make the connection obvious to viewers. In Jingle Jangle, a Christmas movie marketed towards children, mathmagic is clearly the star. But it’s not about either Cold War boosterism or subtle references. Mathmagic is the stand-in for creativity, for the place where the arts and STEM meet.

The characters do not just do math, they perform mathmagic. In fact, only Jeronicus and Journey are presented as having the ability — the “magical” distinction — of writing equations in the air. Mathmagic is the thing that brings the characters together. It bonds them between generations.

Mathmagic also furthers their character development. In a pivotal scene, Journey performs the song “The Square Root of Possible.” When we first see Journey, she is performing calculations for fun. Sitting in her room, she sings about how she should be playing outside instead. After she meets Jeronicus but before she’s made a strong connection with him, she sings “Square Root of Possible.” The song is accompanied by swirling variables and floating numbers, like the ones that came from Jeronicus’s workshop earlier in the movie. Journey’s mathmagic is even more exciting, literally breaking out of the building as she sings. After this song, her math has purposeful magic that is useful and productive.

What’s more, Journey’s journey marks the shift in Jeronicus’s thinking of his own mathmagic. Before meeting Journey, losses sap Jeronicus’s spirit, Christmas and otherwise. To regain “all that he ha[s] lost,” he rediscovers the process of mathmagic, turning calculations from the page to magical suspensions in the air. His growth, set in a Victorian-esque Christmas story, clearly echoes nineteenth-century representations of textuality that represent the page as a porous place of possibility. What’s more, from page to the air, his new-found mathmagic also pushes at the boundaries of the screen.

It is this dramatizing of the thinking of math that can appeal to so many young viewers. It is this dramatizing of the thinking of math that can further address the question of the intersection between the arts and STEM.

So, what does this mean for Jingle Jangle viewers, especially the children in the audience? What does this mean for the way they think about math?

It is perhaps not an accident that this view of mathematics and mathmagic appears in a movie that quietly refigures the racial landscape of an alternate Victorian Christmas. In the process of reaching out to populations who might not see themselves as mathematicians (at least in pop culture), the movie expands its representation of math. In reframing the thinking about math and creativity for children, we have the opportunity to redefine math as creative. In Jingle Jangle, creativity is the domain of both arts and STEM and a major point of identity. The magic happens where the arts and STEM meet.

Donald in Mathmagic Land. Directed by Hamilton Luske, Les Clark, Wolfgang Reitherman, and Joshua Meador, Disney, 1959.

Fiss, Andrew. “The Mathmagics of Media Princesses: Informal STEM Learning, STEM Rhetorics, and Animated Children’s Movies.” Peitho 22.1 (Fall/Winter 2019).

Fiss, Laura Kasson. “Pushing at the Boundaries of the Book: Humor, Mediation and Distance in Carroll, Thackeray, and Stevenson.” The Lion and the Unicorn 38.3 (2014): 258–78.

Heath, Royal Vale. Mathemagic. Simon and Schuster, 1933.

Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey. Directed by David E. Talbert, Netflix, 2020.

Moana. Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, Disney, 2016.

Scheck, Frank. “Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey’: Film Review.” The Hollywood Reporter, 5 Nov. 2020. Accessed 12 November 2020.