Title:
A Christmas
Carol
Format:
CGI animated
feature film
Country:
USA
Production
company:
ImageMovers
Digital, for Walt Disney Studios
Year:
2009
Length:
96 minutes
Setting:
Victorian England
Background:
Depending on how
close you regard the likes of An American Carol to being an actual
adaptation of the story, this was the first major, mainstream American-backed adaptation of A
Christmas Carol to be made for cinema release since the Muppet version some
17 years previously – a film which had also been distributed by Disney. It was
also perhaps one of the most successful cinematic versions of the Carol,
reaching number one in both the US and UK box office charts.
In the late 1990s
and 2000s CGI had come to overtake traditional animation as the production
method for animated feature films, thanks in large part to the success of
productions from Pixar, the makers of Toy Story. This film wasn’t
actually made by Disney themselves in-house, but as part of their partnership
with director Robert Zemeckis’s company ImageMovers – one of only two such
films which ended up emerging from the partnership, the other being Mars
Needs Moms.
As well as the
CGI, the film utilised another technique which was increasingly common during
the early 2000s, having come to prominence in the decade’s Lord of the Rings
films – motion capture, with several of the actors performing the animation
templates for their roles as well as providing the voices. Zemeckis was also
well-known for using performance capture on several of his previous films,
beginning with 2004’s also festive-themed The Polar Express.
 |
| Scrooge, played in both voice and motion capture by Jim Carrey. |
Cast and crew:
Robert Zemeckis
was a hugely successful director in the 1980s and 1990s into the early 2000s,
winning the Academy Award for Best Director for 1994’s Forrest Gump and
also being at the helm for the justly-lauded Back to the Future series. Zemeckis
also handled scripting duties for this adaptation of the story.
As you’d perhaps
expect for a big Disney-backed film from such a lauded director, a suitably
stellar voice and motion-capture cast was assembled, led by comic actor Jim Carrey as Scrooge. Carrey had already portrayed another famous fictional
Christmas curmudgeon in a 2000 adaptation of How The Grinch Stole Christmas,
and here as well as Scrooge he also plays the Ghosts of Christmas Past and
Present.
They can’t have
been short for a bob or two on this production, which makes it all the more
surprising that this isn’t the only doubling-up involved. Oscar winner Gary Oldman voices both Bob Cratchit and Jacob Marley, and Bob Hoskins is Fezziwig
and Old Joe. Colin Firth, just before his own Oscar success in the following
year’s The King’s Speech but already well-known from his Darcy duties,
plays Fred, while an apparent actress shortage leads to Robin Wright Penn being
both of the women dear to Scrooge – Fan and Belle.
Underdone Potato:
The story begin
with the opening of a copy of the Carol designed to look like one of the
original first editions from 1843, and although we do start with the famous
“Marley was dead…” opening, it’s not read by a narrator or one of the
characters, but seen on-screen as the book opens and we zoom in on the first
page.
As is not
altogether uncommon we get a little prequel to the main action, seeing Marley’s
death – explicitly in 1836 as given on his death certificate, one of many
details throughout the whole thing which adhere very closely to the original
book and include little aspects not often seen in other adaptations. These
include, in this sequence alone, the Lord Mayor’s dinner and a blind man’s dog
trying to drag his master away from Scrooge.
Once the main
action of the story starts, we have the visits from nephew Fred and the
charitable gentlemen all very much as written by Dickens, including most of the
original dialogue. Zemeckis puts in a nice jump scare at the door knocker
scene, although once we’re inside Scrooge’s house it doesn’t really match the description
provided by Dickens very well, seeming rather too plush. There’s also a fairly
unnecessary bit of comedy business involving Marley’s jaw, although the end of
his sequence, seeing all the other spirits trying to failing to be able to
intervene positively in the affairs of the living, is nice to see included for
a change.
 |
| The Ghost of Christmas Past, also played by Jim Carrey. |
Past:
I don’t think,
personally, that the version of the Ghost of Christmas Past presented here
works too terribly well. It’s played by Carrey which means he has to
distinguish it from his portrayal of Scrooge, and he does for an Irish accent.
I am not really qualified to judge the quality or otherwise of the accent, of
course, but I’d be surprised if Irish people were terribly happy with it – it
sounds very theme pub “Oirish” to me.
But it’s not just
the voice. The design is simply weird, too. I can see what they were
going for, basing the look of the Spirit on the candle theme of the ghost as
described by Dickens. But its bizarre, free-floating head is quite distracting,
and looks more like the sun baby from the Teletubbies than anything
else.
We get the main
standard scenes often shown in the past section in most adaptations – Scrooge
at school with Fan then coming to get him, the Fezziwigs’ party, and then Belle
leaving him. As is often the case a little more foundation is given to Scrooge
and Belle’s relationship by having her present at the Fezziwig party, but sadly
we don’t get one of my favourite little scenes from the book, Belle with her
eventual husband at the Christmas when Marley died.
However, Zemeckis
is clearly a man with a great deal of fondness for and knowledge of the
original, as demonstrated by the way that here, as all through, he includes
little details from the text such as the fiddler at the party dunking his head
into a bowl of porter at the end of one of the tunes!
Present:
Another ghost
played by Carrey, and therefore another accent – this time it seems to vary a
bit between at points sounding like a poor impression of Ringo Starr, and then
at others sounding as if it’s gone up towards Glasgow.
Once again we
have more little touches from the book – the Spirit wearing a scabbard but no
sword, which Scrooge explicitly points out here. We also get the exchange about
the bakeries being closed on Sundays so the poor can’t get their meat cooked,
although Zemeckis goes further than Dickens in explicitly criticising the
clergy for this, inserting a line about “men of the cloth” into the Spirit’s
speech about those who take he and his brothers’ name in vain.
We visit the
Cratchits and Fred’s house for the usual scenes, and unlike many other versions
Ignorance and Want are both included here, in a rather strange ending to the
scene as we actually see the Spirit decay and die before our very eyes.
 |
| The Ghost of Christmas Present; Jim Carrey once again |
Yet to Come:
The Spirit is
depicted in something close to its usual manner, although as more of a shadow
on the wall or the ground for most of the time than as an actual
three-dimensional being. After the “if a lunch is provided” funeral discussion
scene, the section rather derails into a long and unnecessary chase scene which
was seemingly only included to try and add some visual spectacle, but frankly
ends up dragging on and becoming something of a bore.
We get versions
of the Old Joe scene, the couple in debt who Scrooge’s death has saved, and the
Cratchits mourning the death of Tim. In the graveyard scene at the end of the
section, we’re given a birth date for Scrooge on the gravestone – the 7th
of February 1786. This feels about right, but does mean that the Carrey version
does look like a rather old 57!
In what I think
is one of a few non-coincidental reminders of other film versions of the story,
as Scrooge falls into his grave we see a long way down to the coffin glowing
red at the bottom – a evocation of the “Scrooge’s descent into hell” scene from
the 1970 version, perhaps?
 |
| Dancing with Mrs Dilber; a scene not from the book, but with direct lineage back to the 1935 and 1951 British film versions. |
What’s To-Day:
Scrooge’s
cheerfulness alarms Mrs Dilber in a scene not in the book but instead almost
certainly taken from the 1951 film version – which itself almost certainly took
it from the 1935 Scrooge. I suspect it’s likelier it’s the 1951 version
getting a hat-tip here, however, given it’s the far better-known of the two and
the fact that right at the end there’s also another of its most famous pieces
of imagery, Scrooge carrying Tiny Tim on his shoulder.
Mind you, this
section does have something else in common with the 1935 version which I had never
expected to see in another adaptation after I first saw it – the boy outside
the window giving his dismissive, and now very archaic, “Walk-er!”
response to Scrooge. Another sign of Zemeckis really going back into the text
and sticking to it as much as he feels he can.
Zemeckis also
comes up with the nice idea of having Scrooge arrive at Fred’s house at the
very moment they’re playing the guessing game about him. Speaking of Fred,
often it will be either him or a narrator who delivers a version of the book’s
closing passage at the end – but here it’s actually Bob Cratchit who does it,
as a direct fourth-wall-breaking address to the audience after being sent out
by Scrooge to go and buy another coal scuttle. The usual “Tiny Tim, who did not
die,” is therefore changed to Bob telling us that Tim “got well.”
 |
| Unusually, Bob delivers the closing narration; over his shoulder there's seemingly another visual reference to the 1951 version. |
Review:
This comes very
close to being right up there as one of the finest Carol adaptations,
but doesn’t quite make, for me. A big stumbling block, and I appreciate this
is very subjective, is the medium it’s made in itself – CGI. I am not anti CGI
by any means, and have enjoyed several films made entirely using it. But I
think that we’re still now – and certainly were back in 2009 – at the point
where it works much more effectively with fantasy, cartoonish characters, and
not very well with attempts at realistic depictions of human beings.
While you
certainly get used to it after a while and can lose yourself in the story, to
begin with it does feel very much as though you are watching a computer game on
‘demo’ mode. Many millions will have been lavished on this, but it still ends
up at points feeling quite cheap, because it can never convey the realistic
look that it wants to.
Speaking of
unconvincing, Carrey never really nails the English accent as Scrooge – he
comes across as sounding much more like Mr Burns from The Simpsons, an
impression which probably isn’t helped by the fact that the character design is
also similar.
Zemeckis does
also go a bit overboard with trying to use all the whizzy options CGI gives him
at points, adding a spectacular visual scene to each of the three ghost
visitations. In the past sequence it’s the Spirit’s bell cap going off like a
firework when Scrooge snuffs it out – this works well enough as it’s quite
short. In the present, the ghost disintegrating to a skeleton is at least an
interesting interpretation of what happens to it, but the yet-to-come carriage
chase is a real bore.
However, that’s
not to say this is in any way a bad film overall. Zemeckis includes much more
dialogue and detail from the book than is the case with many, many other
versions. I just can’t help but wish that given they went to all the effort of
using motion capture and so forth, they’d spent the money and used the director
to shoot a live action version instead.
In a nutshell:
If you can get
over the dodgy CGI, this is a very faithful adaptation, but doesn’t quite rank
up there with the very best of them.
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