Disney’s A Christmas Carol (Dan’s Take): B-

Director Robert Zemeckis has a lot to live up to. His motion capture adaptation of the perennial holiday ghost story A Christmas Carol has 150 years of being realized, re-born and re-interpreted again and again. If you’ve been alive at any point since 1843, you probably have your favorite iteration, ranging from the original publication to the stage plays to the 1951 film classic (winner!). It’s clear Robert Zemeckis realized this when he approached his wowie tech version of A Christmas Carol, but with a tale of humanity at its center, does it all come together?

Thanks to the beating heart of a timeless story, yes. But it’s inevitably hindered by the cold limitations and technical focus of Zemeckis’ motion capture animation. … Continue Reading

Trailer Tuesday: A Christmas Carol

At first glance, the cast for Disney’s A Christmas Carol, directed by Robert Zemeckis (The Polar Express, Forrest Gump, Back to the Future) looks fantastic. You have Jim Carrey (Yes Man), Colin Firth (Mama Mia!), Gary Oldman (The Dark Knight), Robin Wright Penn (State of Play), Michael J. Fox (Stuart Little), Bob Hoskins (Doomsday) and Cary Elwes (The Alphabet Killer). But then so did the cast for Beowulf, Zemeckis last film and his last venture into the photorealistic 3D animation world, and we all know how that turned out – craptastic.

The new trailer for Disney’s A Christmas Carol is posted below. The animation looks nothing short of spellbinding and no matter how many times the tale is told, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol never grows old. However, in my opinion, what will either make or break this movie is Jim Carrey. Just how much of his loud, grating overacting audiences can stomach and how he is used will be either the rotten egg or the golden goose for this family feature. Considering Carrey is providing likeness and voice for Ebenezer Scrooge, The Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Christmas Yet to Come, the likelihood of me wanting to gouge my eyeballs out is fairly high.

Disney’s retelling of the Dickens classic opens in theaters, including Disney Digital 3D and IMAX 3D, on November 6, 2009.

“Disney’s A Christmas Carol” Train Tour Rolls Into Ogden

If you simply cannot wait until November and must have your fix of Christmas festivity in June, then keep reading, because next week, on June 16th, Disney is rolling, literally, into Ogden with its “A Christmas Carol” train tour. Yessirree, the Robert Zemeckis-directed “multi-sensory event” hits theaters on November 6, 2009, but someone at Disney and Hewlett Packard thought it would be the shiz niz to chug on down the tracks, stopping in sixteen cities to promote the Jim Carrey-as-Ebenezer-Scrooge surefire blockbuster.  Here’s the offical scoop:

“Sponsored by Hewlett Packard, the Train Tour will travel more than 16,000 miles and pass through 36 states.  Amidst a winter wonderland with holiday décor and Christmas carolers, visitors will see footage from “Disney’s A Christmas Carol” inside a 48-foot-wide, 2-story, inflatable 3-D theatre which will be erected in each city.  Visitors can also check out the cutting-edge technology behind the film, as well as artifacts from the Charles Dickens Museum and interactive games.  Radio Disney will invite kids to enter for a chance to become a Movie Surfer representing their hometown. Each Hometown Movie Surfer will get a chance to appear on Disney Channel by filming their very own Movie Surfer’s segment! The whole experience is free.  The train tour is traveling cross-country with stops in 40 cities, culminating in November at New York City’s Grand Central Terminal. ”

If you’re interested in seeing this in Ogden, head on down to 2501 Wall Avenue on June 16th anytime between 9AM and 7PM. Again, the event is free. If you go, send us some pictures and we’ll post them on the site. Just make sure you are clothed. Remember, this is the “A Christmas Carol” train tour, not the “Beowulf” train tour.

Christmas in May

Robert Zemeckis and his motion capture animation. The Polar Express and Beowulf were both dry and stiff experiments in using “actorly animation”* to tell fantastical tales of creepy hobos, jumpin’ hot chocolate guys, a kid with the most annoying voice in the known universe and naked Norsemen and the long-tailed Angelina Jolie yuck-mouths they knock boots with. While both stories had their original mystique, the animatic execution was cold and detached.

Zemeckis’ next animation project (remember when he did actual films– those were great), A Christmas Carol looks like it’s promising more of the same. But who knows. Beowulf’s benefited from interim advancements in the Zemeckis-pioneered mo-cap animation technology, which allowed it to look slightly less creepy than Polar Express. In turn, maybe A Christmas Carol, starring Jim Carrey as the three ghosts and the old codger Scrooge himself, won’t look like wax mannequins trying to hump a football.

In the mean time, the poster for A Christmas Carol has arrived (that one up there– click it to view it all close-like) and it’s everything you’d dreamed it would be, which is probably not much.

*Overrated. If I want to see an actor, I prefer seeing the actor– not their digitized, mo-capped doppelganger.