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I confess I walked into Disney’s A Christmas Carol with a stern message for Robert Zemeckis: “Put down the digital crayons and start making big boy movies again!” The director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future, Contact and Forrest Gump, Zemeckis’ career has taken a very different course over the past several years with completely computer-generated, motion-capture films such as The Polar Express and Beowulf. However, the critic who swaggered into the theater left humbled and contrite. While I would still like to see Zemeckis revisit the real world again, there is no denying that he still possesses the ability to conjure pure magic.

The classic story—one of ghosts, time travel and redemption—is one of the most familiar in the English language, so much so that it is amazing that Zemeckis and his team manage to infuse it with something new and fresh. Ebenezer Scrooge (enthusiastically voiced by Jim Carrey) is a miserly, misanthropic curmudgeon who is visited by three spirits—the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future (also Carrey)—who show him where he’s lost his soul and where he might find it again.

In a very real sense, this version of A Christmas Carol is the most faithful to Charles Dickens’ original text ever filmed. It’s not merely due to the fact that almost all the dialogue is taken word for word from the original novella, but the film understands, in a way we’ve never seen before, that this is largely a ghost story, a haunted house thriller and it addresses these aspects of the story as a genuine horror film might, nearly devoid of the comic, cartoonish sensibilities that has become the norm in every other incarnation. When the ghosts show up in Scrooge’s bed chambers, they are genuinely terrifying. While this proves to be a simple yet spellbinding interpretation, the nightmarish images do complicate things considerably for the viewing audience. If children are Disney’s target audience, many of them, particularly the youngest, will find the context too dark and horrifying.

Despite all of that, Disney’s A Christmas Carol is still an exuberant, high-spirited, frolicking thrill ride that blossoms from darkness to light with exactly the sort of mirth and merriment one would expect from the oft-told tale. The movie (and without question its director) is in love with its visual effects. When the camera soars over Victorian London, à la Peter Pan, the sensation is nothing short of breathtaking. Other bits, particularly a third act in which Scrooge finds himself shrunken to the size of a rodent and running for his life from demonic steeds, is little more than computer animators garishly and unbecomingly showing off their skills. Still, their skills are hardly in question.

It won’t be long now until the “uncanny valley”—the industry term used to describe the perceived gulf between reality and computer-generated photo realism—is bounded. You can see it falling away already. I recently spoke to one of the animators who worked on Disney’s A Christmas Carol and he told me that in order to meet inflexible release deadlines, the animators were forced to concentrate all their time and energy on the main characters, leaving many of the supporting cast in a more rudimentary state, without the sort of facial expressiveness and eye detailing necessary to convince the viewer the spark of life resides within. The gulf between the two is obvious, but rather than detract from the film (even the most “simplistically” drawn characters are better than most anything we’ve yet seen on screen), the crudely drawn characters actually make the main characters look that much more extraordinary by comparison. Scrooge is as close as animators have ever come to creating a photo-realistic person out of thin air, gaunt and caricatured though he may be.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.