Elf

In Jon Favreau’s 2003 holiday comedy Elf, Buddy (Will Ferrell) is a human orphan who accidentally stows away in Santa Claus's (Edward Asner) sack on Christmas Eve and is raised as an elf at the North Pole by Papa Elf (Bob Newhart). Growing to twice the size of his peers and struggling to keep up with toy-making quotas, Buddy eventually learns the truth: he is human, and his biological father, Walter Hobbs (James Caan), is a cynical, workaholic children's book publisher living in New York City who is on Santa's "naughty list." Dressed in his full elf outfit, Buddy embarks on a journey through the Lincoln Tunnel to Manhattan to find his father. His naive, hyper-enthusiastic embrace of Christmas joy—eating spaghetti drenched in maple syrup, decorating Gimbels department store overnight, and falling in love with a unenthusiastic store worker named Jovie (Zooey Deschanel)—disrupts Walter's corporate world. As Walter's career and personal life unravel under Buddy's chaotic antics, Buddy must help his father rediscover the true meaning of Christmas and rally the people of New York to generate enough Christmas spirit to power Santa's sleigh.