Disney’s A Christmas Carol – Review

What the Dickens? Disney’s A Christmas Carol marks the 14^th film adaptation (with this name, there has been other not named A Christmas Carol) of the classic Charles Dickens novel. Not bad considering he wrote it in a matter of weeks, reportedly for extra cash as his wife was pregnant with their fifth child. Amongst those 14 films, there has been even more retoolings in television adaptations, and stage versions, all of which I can assume, along the way you’ve encountered a few you really liked and a few you have not.

If anything, Disney’s A Christmas Carol proves that Dickens story is so incredibly powerful, that you could just do about anything with the story, and the story itself will make the adaptation automatically good. Essentially, all Robert Zemeckis does here is add a cosmetic face lift to the story. This isn’t the first time this story has been used in animation. Disney in 1983 made a 24 minute short featuring all of their classic characters in Mickey’s A Christmas Carol, but this time Zemeckis adds 3-D. Does it matter though? The 3-D debate will rage on whether it is the next film making evolutionary step or if it’s just a gimmick, and Disney’s A Christmas Carol doesn’t add to either side of that argument. What I did enjoy about the 3-D for this story, however, was it added a sense of involvement for us, the audience. But again, that’s purely cosmetic. You can’t argue that it doesn’t work, because Zemeckis has a superb knack for allowing the 3-D to naturally engulf us into the world of the story he is telling. For this aspect of the film, it works.

Now, the thing that I initially struggled with, is the casting of Jim Carrey as Scrooge. Even with the motion-capture technique Robert Zemeckis has been playing around with for his last few films, the casting of Carrey is odd. Now, Carrey is a comedic goof, but recently has shown his dramatic chops, and he proves it here, with playing numerous roles, namely the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Christmas Yet to Come. It is his voice that to me, makes me all wrong for Scrooge. I like my Scrooge to be a bitter old bastard, but every time Carrey talks, he mimics the shakiness of an old man, and it’s all wrong. Carrey can only be taking serious when he talks softly and calmly. The times Carrey is good, is when he calmly snarls at someone. In fact, this is going to lead to my problem with the film as a whole. Scrooge isn’t mean enough, and we don’t buy his eventually change into a decent man, as we all know is the thematic foundation of the novel.

Zemeckis undercuts it every time. To be fair, Zemeckis is working with a story so well known, that at the end of the day, all he could add was the cosmetic upgrade of the CG. He never makes his version emotionally charged. Even if you try to tell me he did and I’m wrong, I’ll say it is the fact that Charles Dickens story is so good, even in a lifeless project, the quality of his novel shines through. That’s the biggest letdown here; for all of the 3-D whiz-bang and some stylistic flourishes, it never fully comes alive. The only real emotional chord struck in the film is from Gary Oldman as Bob Cratchit, and that’s because Gary Oldman is the master of being a film chameleon.

Like every version of A Christmas Carol, audiences will have their favorites and least favorites, and I will not discourage you away from making this a holiday treat for you and your family. As an adaptation of the classic story, it’s an average take on the tale. I don’t know why Zemeckis’ other Christmas film, The Polar Express, has become a holiday favorite, because I’ll take this over that one, even if I was a little bah ho-hum.

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