Disney's A Christmas Carol
/What else can I be when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart!
~ Scrooge
quick fox: B+ | Copper
winding dragon
The earliest adaptation I can remember of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was the Mickey Mouse version from the ’80s. Since then, I can’t count how many film or stage or written adaptations of the Christmas story I have encountered. Yet, somehow the tale hasn’t grown stale on me, and I still find delight in watching the miserly man who would see the poor die “and decrease the surplus population” transform into the giddy man who lifts up onto his shoulders the joyful Tiny Tim.
But the problem with so many adaptations is that it can be hard to differentiate from all the others, and put an original interpretation onto the classic tale. (Just GoogleSearch “adaptations of A Christmas Carol” and you’ll see what I mean.) Because the story is so familiar to everyone, the margin for error is incredibly narrow as every detail is held under higher scrutiny.
That’s why Disney’s A Christmas Carol (2009) is one my favorite adaptations. In an animation style similar to another one of his Christmas movies (The Polar Express), Robert Zemeckis and ImageMovers Digital used motion capture technology to bring Dickens’ novel to life.
The result is a brilliant, dazzling film that expands the story far more than I had experienced before. Near the beginning of the movie is a three-minute opening shot where the camera flies around London and the audience travels above and through the frostbitten streets. We peer in through the window of an aristocratic home where a decadent feast of uncountable plates line the massive Christmas table. We travel from rooftop to rooftop and see the cityscape stretched before us with the snow whirling into our faces. We pass right in the midst of a market where Christmas wreaths are sold and eels are put into baskets. It’s this kind of incredible detail that the animation offers that other adaptations cannot. Throughout the film, I was awed by the intricate settings that encapsulated a magical Christmas atmosphere.
Besides the animation, the film provides unique versions of the well-known characters. Jim Carrey as Scrooge was an amazing casting choice, as his exaggerated inflections and vibrant physicality works surprisingly well for a scrawny old man with a cane. The Ghost of Christmas Past is an ethereal flame with a haunting, whispering voice of forgotten memories. The Ghost of Christmas Present is a giant, hulking figure with a booming laugh somewhere between jolly and menacing. The Ghost of Christmas Future is but a mere shadow that glides on surfaces and stretches a bony finger across buildings and cobbled streets in an ominous portend of hell itself.
Disney’s A Christmas Carol is great because it recycles an old story with an inventive imagination and spectacular visuals. It has just enough humor to keep it from being boring and is sinister enough to remain exciting.