Title:
A Christmas
Carol
Format:
CGI animated film
Country:
USA
Production
company:
BKN International
Year:
2006
Length:
48 minutes
Setting:
Fantasy version
of Victorian England, populated by anthropomorphic animals
Background:
Really this is a
straight-to-DVD effort, and not long enough to be classed as a ‘feature film’,
but it just about squeaks over the line for a theatrical release as it was
apparently shown in some selected cinemas in the US ahead of its DVD release. BKN,
the makers of this, were a subsidiary of a marketing and advertising agency
called Bohbot, which specialised in the children’s market. They were involved
in a lot of children’s animation down the years, including the TV spin-off of Sonic
the Hedgehog. BKN also made other festive-themed fair, including at least
two productions about the adventures of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
 |
| Should that tree really be green...? |
Cast and crew:
The one name to
stand out in the cast list is that of Timothy Bentinck. He may not be a
familiar face, but he will be a very familiar voice to millions of British
radio listeners as the man who plays David Archer in BBC Radio 4’s soap opera The
Archers, possibly the most popular radio drama in the English-speaking
world. He stars here as the voice of Scrooge.
Scriptwriter Sean Catherine Derek has a long list of animated series credits under her belt,
including episodes of The Smurfs in the 1980s and much more
critically-acclaimed fare than this with the 1990s Batman: The Animated
Series. Director Richard Machin had also worked on Batman and its
cinematic spin-off Mask of the Phantasm as an animation supervisor –
this was a rare promotion to the director’s chair for him.
Underdone Potato:
Scrooge is a
skunk, although the design is so poor that I at first thought he was some sort
of dog until I saw the enormous tail. He also seems to have two Italian mice
living in a hole in his house, making me wonder if someone saw the 2001 version
and somehow got the impression that the mice are part of the original story. Their
presence does raise a lot of questions – they talk, and wear clothes, and are
clearly ‘real’ in this world, so aren’t they basically squatters who have
broken into his home?
Bob Cratchit is a
rabbit with a ludicrous moustache, which makes him look like he’s going to a
fancy dress party as a comedy Frenchman. Mrs Cratchit and Tim start the whole
story off, talking about Scrooge with Tim suggesting he can’t be all that
bad.
Marley arrives
from the fireplace, with a warning that Scrooge will receive three visits –
although he doesn’t specify that they’ll be from spirits. He’s only been dead
two years rather than seven in this version, which seems a bit of a random
change. Perhaps they thought young children would see seven years as far too
massively long a timescale to comprehend!
 |
| Scrooge the skunk! |
Past:
The Ghost of
Christmas Past is a Scottish stork. Obviously.
We basically just
see a series of scenes with Scrooge and his sister, at home in the garden of
their terraced house, and then at school – a boarding school he is sent to by
their father on Christmas Day itself, which seems pretty unlikely.
Scrooge keeps
referring to ‘my sister, Fran’, just in case we’ve forgotten her name in the
twenty seconds or so since he last mentioned it.
Present:
The spirit here
is a rather over-the-top kangaroo, whose Australian accent sounds more like
Eric Idle trying to put one on. He clarifies, presumably for the benefit of the
very young or the hard-of-understanding, that he’s not the spirit of Christmas presents,
but the present as in what’s happening now.
At the Cratchits,
it’s Tim rather than Bob who proposes the toast to Scrooge. Tim is constantly
referred to by his mother, to his face, as ‘Tiny Tim’ rather than simply ‘Tim’,
which seems to be rather needlessly cruelly rubbing it in, really.
At the party at
Fred’s place we see his wife, who conveniently is also a skunk, which makes me
wonder what the ‘rules’ of interspecies relationships would be in this world?
 |
| Bob Cratchit decides to try and rival The Fonz in the moustache stakes! |
Yet to Come:
The most
interesting of the three spirits – depicted as a sort of large, sinister walrus
with a broken tusk, the broken bit tied back on, which does make for a nice
little bit of character design. The spirit speaks in this version, and also has
a word of weird flappy skin which I suspect some poor sod had to writhe about
under a blanket for to be rotoscoped.
The two
charitable gentlemen are the ones discussing Scrooge’s death, which I suppose
makes some sort of sense and from a pragmatic point of view saves on character
design. They certainly seem to want to have as few characters in the thing as
possible. They discuss how Scrooge was buried under a load of his own gold
coins when they fell on him.
Tim isn’t dead,
but has instead become like Scrooge, calling Christmas a humbug. As in some
other versions, Marley appears at the end of this section, to really hammer
home the point to Scrooge.
What’s To-Day:
Scrooge does call
to a boy – animal, whatever you want to call it – out of the window, sends for
a turkey (problematic, you’d think, in this reality) and goes to see Fred and
company. He also plays his little trick on Cratchit, before loading him up with
money and sending him back home again for the day.
There’s then
another visit from Marley, who reveals that because Scrooge has been redeemed
he has also now lost his own chains. The dialogue makes it sound a bit like
this was the whole reason Marley arranged for the spirits to visit Scrooge in
the first place, which makes him sound more selfish than philanthropic.
Cratchit is made
a partner in the business, and we learn from the narrator who comes back in at
the end that Peter is also taken on by the firm. Scrooge, instead of being
referred to as “like a second father” to Tim, is instead described as being
like “an uncle” to him.
 |
| The presence of a butcher in this universe raises some interesting questions. |
Review:
I mentioned in my
review of the 2009 CGI version that despite the budget and resources behind it,
from a modern perspective it still looks rather cheap at times, just because of
the CGI of the age’s issues with trying to depict actual human beings. If that
was cheap, however, then this is absolutely destitute.
In theory being
full of cartoonish animal characters ought to give them an advantage, because it’s
supposed to look unreal anyway. But the whole thing absolutely wreaks of a lack
of ambition or a lack of budget; sparsely-populated streets which just
disappear into empty wildernesses of nothing in the background, like some
half-finished computer game.
There’s a lack of
attention, too. Trees that don’t look much like evergreens in full leaf in the
snow. Scrooge changing colour, in theory I think to look different at night
time and in the daylight, but really it’s done so badly it just looks like they
stopped paying attention. And some characters where you have absolutely no idea
what type of animal they’re even supposed to be.
There’s always a
danger with this sort of thing that you can criticise it unfairly simply because
you’re not in its target audience, which in this case was clearly very young
children. However, if you feel you have to jump through such scripting hoops to
make a version you feel is suitable for them – the script goes out of its way
to avoid mentioning ‘death’, for example, which takes some doing with the Carol
– the it’s questionable whether it was worth doing at all.
In a nutshell:
It’s possible
this could entertain a very young child. But I’d suggest that anyone old
enough to understand this is old enough to see the Muppet version, which is
infinitely superior in every respect.
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