Trailer
Plot summary
A baby at an orphanage climbs into Santa's sack on Christmas Eve and is carried back to the North Pole. The elves find him at the workshop, name him Buddy after the label on his diaper, and Papa Elf adopts him. Buddy grows up thinking he is an elf; at thirty he learns he is human. Papa Elf tells him that his birth parents were Walter Hobbs and Susan Wells, and that Susan placed him for adoption before she died. Walter works at a publishing company housed in the Empire State Building and has no idea he has a son. Buddy goes to New York and turns up at Walter's office, where Walter takes him for a messenger delivering a Christmas-gram and has him thrown out.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Elf (2003)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- David Berenbaum initially wrote the script for Elf in 1993, and the early candidates to play Buddy were Chris Farley and Jim Carrey.
- Garry Shandling was offered the role of Walter Hobbs but declined, and Katie Holmes was the first choice for Jovie before turning it down to Zooey Deschanel. Wanda Sykes was cast as the Gimbels manager, Wanda, dropped out, and Faizon Love took her role and used the nametag made for her.
- Jon Favreau found the original script “much darker” and was not interested until he realized he could make Buddy's world an homage to the Rankin/Bass Christmas specials. That turn let him conceive a film rated PG, where he guessed the original script would have been PG-13.
- The film makes heavy use of forced perspective to exaggerate Buddy's size next to the other elves, with stop motion animation for certain sequences. CGI was kept to a minimum by Favreau's own preference, something he later noted he “had to fight very hard” for.
- Will Ferrell said in interviews that he suffered ill effects after eating the sugary foods that his character Buddy consumes in the film.
