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.

The tale is familiar: Scrooge (Jim Carrey) is a crusty old jerk. He hates Christmas, but most of all he hates people. On Christmas Eve, Scrooge gets his when he’s visited by four ghosts who allow him to review his life and its future, giving the old crank a change of heart and causing him to see and share in the joy of humanity.

To his credit, Zemeckis stays mostly true to Dickens’ classic, though there’s enough emphasis on the scary ghost story to give parents pause when taking their young children: For a “family” movie the macabre is surprisingly punched up. As counterbalance, Zemeckis does attempt to infuse his A Christmas Carol with a modern dose of kid-friendly roller coaster/thrill ride inspired modernization ala a bottle-rocketed trip across the moon and a scene better titled “Honey, I Shrunk the Scrooge” (both of which you’ve seen in the trailer). Each of these scenes feel weirdly out of place and the introduction of zany slapstick feels more like padding and infantilization than a real stab at revarnishing the story for modern audiences.

The same tonal criticism holds true for the animation– A Christmas Carol is richly detailed, but with so much emphasis on making the animation photo-real, the characters still inhabit a cartoonish quality which, at times, make the proceedings feel like a pixelated marionette show. On that level, A Christmas Carol loses some immersion the same way its dead-faced spiritual predecessors The Polar Express and Beowulf did. Virtually every frame comes off as technical exercise– as if the whole process is more concerned with the textile details in a set of drapes, subsequently relying on the motion capture technology to address character performance. Nowhere is this more evident than the finale, where the  crowd-pleasing Scrooge-becomes-lovable payoff — the point of the whole story– is wrapped up in just a few beat-by-beat minutes.

Hence the crux of A Christmas Carol’s weakness: By eschewing the hyper-stylized, exaggerated realism of animation for a motion capture system that doesn’t have the soul of tactile human emotion, there’s an unnerving lifelessness to the characters. When Bob Cratchit (Gary Oldman)–reduced here to a creepy hobgoblin Clint Howard/Gary Oldman love child– can’t achieve the crucially sentimental story connection he’s meant to employ,  the result is an audience watching the movie at arms length.

But while the film certainly has weaknesses, they don’t sink A Christmas Carol. In fact, Jim Carrey’s subtle performance as Scrooge and the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future is a very good one, thanks in large part to a welcome dose of subtlety and a lack of the usual Carrey-centric eccentricities. The gorgeous animation is incredibly lush and you can all but feel the the cold, foggy streets of London and the crisp winter landscapes of nearby villages. The whole process is made even more vibrant by the now-standard and almost immersive Disney Digital 3D process. Inevitably, however, under all the whiz-bangery, Disney’s A Christmas Carol can attribute its buoyancy to Dickens’ surprisingly timely Christmas fantasy and its insistence on remaining a story worth telling.

Disney’s A Christmas Carol will certainly win the weekend, but whether it has the ability to endure as a holiday classic remains to be seen. For now, A Christmas Carol is an enjoyable experience, just not a lasting one.

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.

“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.

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.