Firstly kudos to the whomever designed this German poster (left) for the new Robert Zemeckis film, far better than the overly cartoonish ones we have in the UK.Okay, first up i'm going to tackle the style before i tackle the film because the style is the film these days for Robert Zemeckis. I have never made any secret of the fact i hate Zemeckis' style of motion capture animation with its dead eyes and waxen skin. It's ugly, unrealistic and unpleasant to watch.
Now mo-cap can be used brilliantly, especially when placing a single mo-cap character into a more substantive world - Gollum in Lord Of The Rings or King Kong for example - but in each of Zemeckis' all mo-cap films (The Polar Express, Beowulf and now this) the style simply doesn't work. The characters have no weight for starters. A man walking, a dog running, a horse galloping - none look like they are subject to the laws of gravity in these films; like they are floating just above the surface.
On most characters, where Zemeckis has tried to achieve a "realistic" look (the kids in Polar Express, the humans in Beowulf, Fred (Colin Firth), Bob Cratchit (Gary Oldman), Fezziwig (Bob Hoskins) etc in A Christmas Carol) the facial features are awkward and waxen with eyes that show no light, no soul. It is like the living dead. Perhaps Zemeckis should team with George Romero on the next Living Dead film, because he certainly has found the right technology for it!
Curiously though A Christmas Carol does feature the first instances of Zemeckis getting it right, achieving characters that work in the mo-cap and don't look like horror film rejects, and this is because in these two instances he hasn't gone for a "realistic" human look but played up the cartoonish quality of each character - namely Scrooge (Jim Carrey) and Marley (Gary Oldman). Even the eyes work for Scrooge, which is a marvel and makes you wonder why Zemeckis and his team can't spot the difference and didn't strive to achieve with the other characters (or least the other lead characters) what they did with Ebenezer. The eyes are still glazed on Marley but as a ghost it works for him. Both faces are very exaggerated and cartoony and somehow fit more naturally to the form than other attempts.
The film itself is patchy. Carrey as Scrooge (baring more than a passing resemblance to his character in Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events) is fantastic. He hams up the right amount to overplay the character in the manner Dickens wrote it and yet is believable both as the vicious, mean-spirited Scrooge we are introduced to and the frightened, humbled Scrooge we get along the way. Many film and theatre Scrooges (and i've seen many on film and in the theatre, as well as reading the book every year) fail to convince somewhere along the line - after all Scrooge does go through major character transformations through what is a short story set over a very short period of time. Carrey should be commended here and for once (for the first time) he isn't let down by the rendering into Zemeckis' animation.
The ghosts are sadly less successful. There is a nice, and slightly different from the common form, take on the Ghost of Christmas Future, but Carrey plays the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present with, respectively, a bizarre Irish lilt and a kind-of Liverpudlian tinge that makes the latter sound like the Ghost of Christmas Beatles!
Oldman is let down by the rendering of Bob Cratchit (and hiderous man-child Tiny Tim!) but does his best. He is great as Marley's Ghost though and again, for once, the style doesn't interfere.
Firth's Fred, Scrooge's nephew, is terrible on every level. He looks awful for a start. This may be the worst rendered character in one of these Zemeckis films - with the possible exception of Steven Tyler's elf in Polar Express! But Firth doesn't help matters. Tonally he is all off. His reading often comes off as angry or irritated when Fred, as Dickens wrote him, is unassailable in his joviality when dealing with Scrooge. He is the beacon of light. In this version you can frankly see why Scrooge wouldn't want to spend Christmas with him and that's just all wrong! In his jovial moments he also doesn't sound jolly so much as slightly tipsy speaking with a frantic squeak that sounds bizarre. A terrible piece of bad casting.
Hoskins is fine for Fezziwig but is again let down by the animation.
For the most part the story is fairly close to the book, excising a few moments but actually featuring elements that rarely make it into film adaptations - most notably the presence of the child-incarnations of want and ignorance that dwell beneath the cloak of the Ghost of Christmas Past. I'm not sure i can recall them ever making it off the page before.
Unfortunately there are a couple of poor choices. A completely unnecessary spectral-horse action sequence to add "a bit of excitement" for the ADD youth of today is a real shame and the changing of one of the books most famous lines is unforgivable (at least he didn't change the "God bless us, everyone").
Much of the film works and the shame, as always with this type of animation - and especially given that Carrey's look here is so similar to what has been achieved with make-up before - it that Zemeckis continues to insist to making his films with motion-capture technology rather than making a proper film. Zemeckis once made great films like Back To The Future, Romancing The Stone, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and I believe that The Polar Express and his A Christmas Carol might have stood a chance to being up near those greats it he'd made them as real films. The mo-cap just isn't working Bob, give it up. Please.
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