A Christmas Carol - 2017, animation

Title:

A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Short online animation
 
Country:
Turkey
 
Production company:
Adisebaba
 
Year:
2017 – first posted on YouTube on December 25^th that year
 
Length:
11 minutes
 
Setting:
Victorian-ish!
 
Background:
I came across this on YouTube when searching for a short version I could review today because I was a couple of Carols short on this year’s schedule – due to ones I’d planned to review either turning out not to exist, or not being available. I only had a very small amount of time to put today’s review together, pretty close to the wire, so when I was this one I decided that would do.
 
It’s had one-and-a-half million views on YouTube, so probably far, far more viewers than, say, some of the Amazon Prime films I’ve watched. The YouTube channel it’s from, “Fairy Tales and Stories for Kids”, lists itself as being US-based on its “About” page, but the company behind it, Adisebaba, is Turkish.

 
Cast and crew:
There are absolutely no credits on this whatsoever, so it’s pretty much impossible to find out who did what or anything about them. There appear to be just two performers doing all of the voices, however – one male and one female. At first I couldn’t place the accents – trying to work out if they were Americans trying to do English accents, or South Africans, or what. However, if they’re from people for whom English is a second language, then some of the weird emphasise and intonations throughout do make sense. Most of the story is narrated by the female performer, with occasional bits of dialogue given to the characters here and there.
 
Underdone Potato:
The first thing to note is that this is not, strictly-speaking, A Christmas Carol in the sense that it’s not set at Christmas. Instead, the story has been moved to New Year’s Eve and is more of A New Year’s Carol. The reasons for this are unclear. I could understand if the idea were to completely secularise the story – but on the other hand, the idea of New Year’s Eve in this form surely comes from a Christian calendar anyway, and Christmas (although not, admittedly, Christian) iconography such as Christmas trees still features. They also retain the title A Christmas Carol and released it on Christmas Day, so it’s all a bit weird.
 
As is the naming policy – hardly anybody is named apart from ‘Mr Scrooge’, with Bob becoming his ‘Helper’, as if he’s a live-in carer or something. Said ‘Helper’ wants to go early to buy his son a New Year’s present (what?), but Scrooge quite rightly points out he shouldn’t have left it to the last minute to do so.

Nephew Fred is just a nameless nephew here, and younger than in the book, too – just a child. Marley becomes Scrooge’s nameless ‘friend from work’, who has to ‘walk around the world in shackles’ as if it’s a charity world record attempt, with the whiff of a script that’s been put through Google’s auto-translate or something.

 

Some of the odd performance aspect comes in when Scrooge tells Marley to go, and he very casually replies, ‘Okay then, just wanted to warn you…’ Unusually, Marley – sorry, Scrooge’s ‘friend from work’ – actually tells Scrooge that the three spirits coming to visit him will show him visions of the past, the present and the future.
 
As in the dreadful 1997 version, Scrooge has a mean pet dog – rather pointlessly, as it doesn’t actually do anything.
 
Past:
The Ghost of ‘Last Year’s New Year’s Eve’ is a floating child, who takes Scrooge back to his own childhood. We see young Scrooge and his friends decorating a tree ‘like a Christmas tree’ (no, it is a Christmas tree), and then a party at his ‘first boss’s house’, this version’s equivalent of the Fezziwig party. It’s a weirdly-animated mix of 1950s and Victorian styles, and Scrooge is there with his wife – not named as Belle, of course. Then we see his wife leaving him later, when she’s realised he’s only obsessed with money.

Present:
The ‘Ghost of This Year’s New Year’s Eve’ appears to be a Ghost of Christmas Present tribute act, depicted very similarly to the traditional versions. We see Scrooge’s ‘Helper’ and his family, with a young son in a wheelchair, and Scrooge’s family – his nephew and nephew’s parents (Scrooge’s brother and his wife, we later learn) having ‘So much fun eating’. At the end of the section, we’re very casually told the Spirit informed Scrooge that it was ‘Time for him to die’ before revealing versions of Ignorance and Want, renamed as ‘Greedy and Unconcerned’ which seems a bit of a weird inclusion in such a stripped-down, young child-friendly version.

Yet to Come:
Another tribute act here, this time seemingly to the rapper Flava Flav, as a fairly traditional depiction of the ‘Ghost of the Future’ is wearing a clock around its neck. We’re shown Scrooge’s funeral, where he’s weirdly being buried right next to his Helper’s son’s grave.

What’s To-Day:
All the usual – Scrooge gets into the spirit of Christmas New Year’s Eve, sends toys and food to his Helper’s family, goes and has dinner with his own family, and starts splashing out money on charity.
 
Review:
This is a weird old thing. The animation isn’t actually bad at all, even though some of the design choices are a bit odd. And for an 11-minute version, they actually manage to include quite a large number of elements from the original story. However, the script just has so many odd bits and pieces to it, and the performances are so deeply unusual, that the whole thing comes across as being almost entirely computer-generated, voices and script and all.

That actually gives it some attraction, however. It’s so deeply odd that it’s actually quite funny. And at least it is fairly brief – although absolutely stuffed to the gills with adverts. I’d love to know the story behind the whole New Year’s Eve decision, and the oddness of the script, although sadly I doubt I ever will.
 
In a nutshell:
Actually worth watching for amusement value alone, if you have 11 minutes to spare.
 
Links:
YouTube