A cartoon filled with scary-eyed fake people, just in time for Christmas! In 2004, director Robert Zemeckis made The Polar Express, a groundbreaking piece of digital tomfoolery that took live actors, filmed their movements, then digitized them so that they looked like zombified animatrons with rubber skin. It was ugly and expensive, and it frightened many children. But it still made a large amount of money, so Zemeckis has been tasked with making another ugly animated feature -- this time, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, with Jim Carrey playing Scrooge and two of the three ghosts who give the ol' skinflint a schooling on yuletide attitude. Was this necessary? Desirable? Even vaguely interesting? Not really, but that hasn't stopped Hollywood before.
Just like the original story, but with a lot more stuff flying around. To be fair, Zemeckis' favored CGI technique has come a ways since Polar Express and the gawdawful Beowulf, and the people in A Christmas Carol often look something like real humans, albeit with the same dead, unfocused eyes. Most importantly, the character movements have become less robotic, an advance in which Zemeckis revels. His self-satisfied delight is apparent in the way that his Carrey-Scrooge flails and tumbles about in his nightshirt and cap, falling down often and flying through the air, rocketing towards the moon and shrinking to tiny size as he log-rolls on icicles. You can almost hear Zemeckis thinking, “People love this story, sure, but it needs wild, improbable action scenes!” And, of course, it's in 3-D as well, which means that there must be people flying, and wild chases, and stuff jumping out at the audience. Because while we all love Victorian serial fiction, what it lacks is a heavy dose of technological gee-whiz.
Thank you, Robert Zemeckis, for finally making a Christmas Carol with rockets and extended chase scenes. Zemeckis claims to be a fan of Dickens' tale, and to have made a film true to the original story. "We never had the cinematic tools to really present it as spectacularly as it was written," he recently said in an interview. This might be news to anyone who's enjoyed any of the countless versions that have been presented before now, like 1951's Scrooge with Alastair Sim, or A Muppet Christmas Carol starring an exemplary Michael Caine, or the 1984 TV movie with George C. Scott, David Warner and Susannah York. How fortunate we are that none of us knew how poorly made and incomplete these were when we first saw them! If only there had been motion-capture animation techniques available to drain all human light from Sims' eyes, and to turn Caine into a latex-faced cyborg!
I hear Dickens was a huge fan of Dumb and Dumber. The real question, however, is what Dickens would have thought of the way Zemeckis has poked, prodded and contorted his story. Would he have appreciated Carrey's mugging and cavorting as Scrooge, or his portrayal of the Ghost of Christmas Past as a glowing candle with a bad Irish accent, or his Ghost of Christmas Present as a scenery-chewing giant with an even worse Scottish brogue? Would Dickens have found the extensive action sequences -- including the one where Scrooge is miniaturized, flees a team of demonic horses, and crawls through the sewer pipes -- appropriate to his somber ghost story? The odds are that, no, Dickens would not. He would most likely be horrified that his work had been mutated into a garish, badly acted, aesthetically unpleasant mish-mash of kitsch and condescension, and would have probably struck Zemeckis soundly with the business end of his buggy whip.