Maybe it's the unthreatening handsomeness, the wide blue eyes, the tenor voice that sounds more boyish than you'd expect from a guy who's nearly 6 foot 4. Whatever it is, Ferrell's ability to turn a potentially annoying character into an ingratiating one works wonders for "Elf," director Jon Favreau's effort to add a new classic to the annals of Christmas comedies. Darned if Ferrell and Favreau don't come very close to pulling it off.

In "Elf," Ferrell plays Buddy, who as a baby stowed away with Santa (Ed Asner) and got an unexpected trip to the North Pole. There, he's raised by elves (particularly Papa Elf, played by a pitch-perfect Bob Newhart). He learns their ways (which involve eating a lot of sugared food) and their skills, although he can make only a measly 85 Etch-A-Sketches a day — good for a human, paltry for an elf. Buddy thinks he "is" an elf, though, until he overhears a conversation revealing his true heritage, and he decides to journey off to find the father he never met (his mother, sadly, died long ago).

It's in these early scenes that Favreau and screenwriter David Berenbaum (who also wrote the upcoming "The Haunted Mansion)" reveal their ambitions: The North Pole is an art-directed fantasyland, with candy-colored sets that make no pretense about their fakery, and the animals and toys that talk to Buddy move stiffly in ways that resemble old Rankin-Bass stop-motion TV classics such as "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer." It's been a long time since a truly great Christmas movie was made, and Favreau and Berenbaum, without much commercialism in mind (despite a few annoying product placements), are clearly angling to create one.

What keeps them from succeeding are elements of familiarity: We've seen dozens of variations on the innocent lost in the big city, and Ferrell's Buddy makes the usual discoveries about things that we take for granted. And this is yet another Christmas movie in which someone melts the heart of a Grinchy workaholic, in this case Buddy's true father (James Caan), a children's-book editor more concerned with the bottom line than with entertaining kids.

Still, if the filmmakers are going places many others have gone before, at least they find the warmth and humor in those places. If you ran into Buddy in real life, you'd be calling security a lot more quickly than this movie's characters do (a man in an elf suit waits outside a New York elementary school for five hours and no one calls the cops — talk about a fantasyland). But Ferrell is so ingratiating — he's as eager to please as an Irish setter — that he makes you root for Buddy, and laugh out loud at his confusion and his antics.

Screenwriter Berenbaum has also come up with a sweet love story in which Buddy falls for a bored department-store elf, played by Zooey Deschanel with her usual scene-stealing abilities. Deschanel gets to sing, and although that could have been embarrassing, her pleasantly unaffected voice goes a long way toward adding to this movie's good will (her closing-credit duet with Leon Redbone on "Baby It's Cold Outside" is destined to become a light-rock Christmas classic).

Time will tell where this movie falls in line with other Christmas films. So far, it has avoided the overmerchandising and calculated air that make critics so suspicious of movies like the upcoming "Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat." "Elf" is as heartwarming as it is funny, and a big notch in Ferrell's red felt cap.