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| Those bloody mice even make it onto the title card! |
Title:
Christmas
Carol: The Movie
Format:
Animated feature
film.
Country:
UK
Production
company:
Illuminated Films
and MBP
Year:
2001
Length:
81 minutes
Setting:
Victorian
Background:
Really in the
dying days of traditional animation being used for feature films here as CGI
began to take over, this was a rare British effort at a full-length animated
film for cinema release – although animation studios from various countries
were employed to put the thing together. Some of the backers of the project –
Pathe, FilmFour (the feature film arm of the UK television broadcaster Channel
4) and the UK Film Council (at the time the state body responsible for granting
arts money for film production) – were to be seen on the credits of many
British films of the period. Various of them, it must be said, much more
successful than this, both financially and artistically.
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| A younger-looking Scrooge than usual. |
Simon Callow provides
the voice of Scrooge, and in some versions of the film also appears as Charles
Dickens in live action sequences bookending the story as the author performing
one of his famous readings of the Carol. Callow was a familiar face from
a host of British films and television programmes – perhaps most notably on the
big screen, his scene-stealing supporting role in Four Weddings and a
Funeral in 1994 – but there’s little doubt he was cast here because of his
reputation as a leading expert on Dickens, who had himself performed a version
of the author’s reading of the Carol.
There’s a fairly
stellar supporting cast, too, led by Kate Winslet as a version of Belle with a
greatly expanded and changed role in the story. Winslet was one of the
best-known British actresses in the world at this point, as indeed she probably
still is – pre her Oscar success, but only a few years after starring in the
enormously successful Titanic. Her sister Beth also appears as Scrooge’s
sister, Fan, and Kate recorded a song called What If? for the soundtrack
which helped gain the film much of its publicity at the time and even managed
to make it to number six in the UK singles chart. This perhaps gives some
indication of Winslet’s fame at the time.
Many of the rest
of the voices will also be very familiar to viewers of British television and
films of the late 20th and early 21st centuries – Absolutely
Fabulous and Little Voice star Jane Horrocks as the Ghost of
Christmas Past, another Working Title Films scene-stealer, Notting Hill’s
Rhys Ifans as Bob Cratchit, Truly, Madly, Deeply star Juliet Stevenson, Red Dwarf’s Kryten, Robert Llewellyn, as Old Joe (whose role in the story is also greatly expanded) and
Michael Gambon as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Llewellyn also co-wrote the
script for this adaptation, alongside Dutchman Piet Kroon who has few other
writing credits and mostly seems to have worked on the animation side of things
on other films.
Then, among all
these UK-based stars, there’s a real “They’ve cast who!!??” moment when
you discover that Marley’s ghost is being played by Hollywood’s own Nicolas Cage. What the hell they paid, or what dirt they had, to get Cage to sign up
for this is anybody’s guess.
The film was
directed by American Jimmy Murakami, who had worked on one of the most famous
Christmas films of all, The Snowman, as well another Channel 4 1980s
Raymond Briggs adaptation, When the Wind Blows.
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| Not my favourite characters... |
Underdone Potato:
One of the
biggest problems this film has is that it takes so long before it
actually starts the story of A Christmas Carol – a good ten or fifteen
minutes or so. Before this, it sets out its own very different supporting
story, with Scrooge buying a collection of debts from a man named Leech – named
of course for the original illustrator of the Carol. One of these debts
is that of a children’s hospital, where Scrooge’s former love Belle now works.
She’s not happily married with her own family as in the book, but working hard
for the poor and destitute.
There are some references
to things mentioned in the book, such as a blind man’s dog cowering from
Scrooge, but some of the characterisations are very different and just plain
odd. Scrooge himself is a little younger than usual – middle-aged rather than
old – and has some sympathetic traits right from the start, being friendly to
an anthropomorphic mouse, one of a pair that infest the film in an apparent
attempt to take the rough edges off for very young children. He’s also shown
having a moment of fond remembrance of Marley (who gets his name first on the
business sign outside the office here), all of which makes Scrooge’s redemption
seems less powerful if he is already shown some chinks in his armour right from
the very start. Mind you, he is also inferred to have some direct
responsibility for Tiny Tim’s early death when he throws a bucket of water over
him for carol singing outside the office.
Fred is very
different here – less ‘hail fellow well met’ and instead a rather weak and
pathetic-seeming figure. Old Joe is introduced earlier and works for Scrooge in this version, repossessing the belongings
of those who default on their debts, and seeing that those who owe the money
are sent to a debtors’ prison.
There’s a change
in the ordering of events, too – Marley (inexplicably American, for no other
reason than they’ve cast Cage) visits Scrooge at the office, after
Fred’s visit and Bob having gone home, but before the two charitable
gentlemen later turn up, with Scrooge at first suspecting them to be spirits. That
said, there is a very nice touch at the end of Marley’s visit, where we see
other chained spirits hauling him back off from whence he came.
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| A nice idea, as Marley is hauled away in chains. |
Past:
Back home and
finally in bed, after more comedy business with the mice, Scrooge is confronted
by the Ghost of Christmas Past, who resembles the version in the book but is
recognisably female rather than androgynous. There is another nice touch here,
though, as the spirit’s age keeps alternating between youthful and wizened, and
I also liked the spinning effect she does when moving between scenes.
There’s some
rather beautiful animation near the beginning of this sequence too, as winters
and autumns come and go across the landscape in melancholy pastels as the
Spirit takes Scrooge back to his old school. When Fan comes to take him home, there is someone else with her in the carriage; many versions like to introduce
Belle early as a guest at the Fezziwigs’ party, but here they put her in even
earlier, making her Fan’s best friend and having her meet Scrooge at the end of
his schooldays, and she is then also at the party in the next sequence.
We also get their
traditional parting scene, framed more as her being upset that Scrooge wants
her to sign a pre-nuptial agreement! Scrooge’s family life is also expanded
upon, with Fan’s husband also being called Fred, and their father having cut
her out of his will because he did not approve of the marriage.
Present:
In some ways this
is the most faithful section to the original story – the spirit spills
Christmas cheer from his lamp on various of those around him, and we get the
visits to the mine, the ship at sea and the lighthouse. The Spirit flying
through the air with Scrooge is somewhat reminiscent of the Snowman flying with
the boy over the sea in The Snowman, which is perhaps not surprising
given that the director also worked on that famous production, and the pastel
backgrounds of the sea sequence really do evoke Raymond Briggs’s work too.
There’s an
interesting little moment where the Spirit has given his horn to Scrooge to
spread cheer with, and Ebenezer can’t bring himself to spill it over a prison
or a workhouse, so the Spirit has to take it back to do so, showing that the
old miser’s conversion isn’t done yet. This is in contrast to some other
versions where he seems about ready to repent after the first one or two
Spirits alone.
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| Not heading to the snowmen's Christmas party... |
Yet to Come:
For a production
which seems to go out of its way to be excessively child-friendly when it
doesn’t need to be, the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come is suitably ghoulish,
with a skull face visible through the folds of its hood, making it look even
more like the traditional figure of Death than usual.
The visions are
done quite differently in most of this section – some might say cheaply, but to
be fair I think it’s a deliberate stylistic choice that does work quite well. The
Cratchits mourning Tim’s death appear in silhouette behind Scrooge and the Spirit
in some otherworldly non-place, with one or two of them then framed against the
action like portraits. There’s also a section left out of many adaptations,
taken from the book but with the characters changed here – instead of the young
couple being relieved by Scrooge’s death and saying whoever their debt is
transferred to can’t be as bad, it’s Belle and the doctor who runs their
children’s hospital.
Like the 1970
musical, Marley puts in a guest appearance at the end of this section, as a
final reminder perhaps for Scrooge to change his ways, just in case he was
thinking of wavering! There’s an interesting contrast to some of the silent
versions, where the reformed Scrooge throws money at people as if that will
solve everything – here as he’s dragged away by chains he desperately throws
money as he pleads for mercy, which clearly does him no good and is more in
keeping with the tone of the original story.
What’s To-Day:
I mentioned that
in some versions Scrooge seems to be ‘done’ too early in his visitations, and
here they almost go too far the other way. He seems to waver once or twice even
after having woken up, before a couple of gentle reminders with visions of him
in chains in the mirror persuade him to accept the lessons of the Spirits in
full.
The boy outside
Scrooge’s window isn’t just passing by but building a snowman, which from the
looks of it could possibly also be a deliberate reference to The
Snowman, although that might just be coincidence. As Scrooge goes about the
streets as a new man we get little guest appearances from the Spirits of Past
and Present, although not Yet to Come as I suppose that wouldn’t quite fit the
mood!
We get Kate
Winslet’s song in this section as she sits sadly in her empty hospital, before
going to see Scrooge where they finally have their reunion. Scrooge mentions it
having been “twenty years” since he left her, which backs up the idea that he
is middle-aged rather than old in this version. Mind you, he can’t be all that
ancient in the book, given that we know when Marley died seven years before it
started, Belle still had young children.
It all seems to
be wrapped up rather quickly at the end, and there’s an oddity in that it’s
Callow as Dickens delivering the closing narration, which as we’ve just spent
the film hearing him as Scrooge feels like an odd gear change to have him
suddenly talking about the character in the third person.
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| Oh, sod off! |
Review:
This film feels
like a real missed opportunity. There is a superb, high-quality cast, and while
the animation doesn’t have the budget and scope of a Disney production there’s
still clearly been a lot more time, effort and money put into it than most
other animated versions of the Carol, which were usually made for
television or direct-to-video.
The fault, I’m
afraid, can be laid fairly and squarely at the door of the script. The Carol
is such a strong story that you’re always in trouble when you start to try and
muck about with it too much, and I’m not really sure what they thought they were doing
with all the changes they made here. Perhaps they felt with so many other
versions having already been done in the past they needed to make an effort to
make theirs distinctive – but if that’s the case, why do the Carol at
all, a story which is so familiar to so many?
Many of the
changes seem designed to make the story more appealing to children, such as the
recurring characters of the two mice and much of even the most famous pieces of
dialogue from the story having been simplified into rough approximations of the
original lines. Ten or twenty years earlier you could perhaps have understood
this, but by this point the Muppet version had already proved that you didn’t need
to water down the story so much to make it popular with children. And if you’re
trying to make it work for very young children, are they really the ones
making the decisions about what to go and watch anyway?
In a nutshell:
When you call
your film Christmas Carol: The Movie as if there haven’t been dozens of
other versions before, you’re really making a big claim to be definitive. Unfortunately,
despite the impressive cast and good animation, a disappointing script means
that this is very far from that.
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