Disney’s Christmas Carol: A Movie Review
Did we really need another helping of the classic Dickens story from Hollywood? The answer is an enthusiastic yes! Disney’s version of A Christmas Carol exceeded my expectations by a long shot.
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What I anticipated to be another family-friendly Christmas flick is in fact a thrilling ghost movie, to the point that I actually jumped in my seat a few times during the screening.
You can take your kids to see it but I would definitely not call this a kiddie movie.
We all know the story by heart, but here’s a quick recap anyway: in 1843 London, Ebenezer Scrooge is an old, stingy businessman who has no interest in partying or helping those in need (two things the rest of us normally do around Christmas time). On Christmas eve, Scrooge receives the visit of his associate, Jacob Marley, who doesn’t look nor sound too good, which is kind of normal since the guy’s already been dead for seven years. Marley pledges Scrooge to change his ways and announces the arrival of three ghosts who will visit Scrooge over the course of the night: a ghost of Christmas past, a ghost of Christmas present, and a ghost of Christmas future. With each ghost, Scrooge undergoes an express form of shock psychotherapy which proves to be quite effective by the end of the night.
Accordingly, the movie featured a number of ghost characters, both principal and secondary. At times it felt like a commercial for the Haunted Mansion at DisneyWorld. The ghosts were very well designed. I especially liked the ghosts of Christmas past and Jacob Marley. In Dickens’ book, it’s not clear what the ghost of Christmas past is supposed to look like; therefore the art directors had to come up with their own version of the character. The ghost of Christmas past looked like a cute, creepy version of Lumière, the candle guy from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. He was a cool character to listen to, even though he had a minor speech deficiency. Marley’s ghost, on the other hand, looked like he had paid a visit to Medusa’s hairdresser. I found him quite scary-looking.
Shot with performance capture, the movie sits midway between a cartoon and a real life action picture. The 3-D effects were nice, but I didn’t find them essential to the visual atmosphere of the movie, except for the flying scenes. Those were quite exhilarating. The setting of London in the 1840s was very well recreated. In his book, Dickens wanted to depict the extreme poverty that was affecting a great number of Londoners at the time and the movie did show that it was not the most pleasant time to be living in.
Jim Carrey does a fine impersonation of Ebenezer Scrooge, along with Gary Oldman who impersonates a number of characters, the most striking being Marley’s ghost.
Alan Silvestri wrote the score for the film; I liked the way he took on Christmas classics and mixed them with his own compositions.
The storyline flows smoothly through the movie, except for a chase scene that I found overstretched towards the end of the movie, when the ghost of Christmas Past is trying to catch Scrooge.
Robert Zemeckis, who also directed The Polar Express, has a blast making those performance-capture movies, and it shows. He injected a lot of creativity into this film. It is not the kind of animated production you would normally expect from Disney studios, and I’m pretty sure that the producers have let Zemeckis build the movie according to his own vision. It is a refreshing version of an old Christmas classic that will eventually become a classic in its own right.
