A Christmas Carol Movie Review

Director Robert Zemeckis continues to perfect the motion-capture animation he revolutionized with The Polar Express, and the result is quite breathtaking in A CHRISTMAS CAROL. From the pimples on an adolescent's face to the coins on a corpse's eyes, the technology accounts for a remarkable degree of detail. The 3-D, in particular, is fantastic -- albeit occasionally frightening (a few shots may cause audiences to jump from their seats). With a rubber-faced actor like Carrey as the star, it's no wonder that the characters' expressions and gestures are so startlingly realistic. Of course, the downside to all of the realism is that the ghost scenes are actually quite frightening -- not Beowulf terrifying, but downright scary nonetheless. The spook factor is unfortunate for parents who will naturally assume that animation plus holiday classic equals cinematic fun for the whole family.
For those with harder-to-rattle clans, this is a touching and haunting adaptation of a story most of us know by heart in one form or the other.

A Christmas Carol Movie Trailer

A Christmas Carol (named on-screen and in promotional material as Disney's A Christmas Carol) is a 2009 3D computer animated motion-capture holiday fantasy comedy-drama film written and directed by Robert Zemeckis. It is an adaptation of the Charles Dickens story of the same name and stars Jim Carrey in a multitude of roles, including Ebenezer Scrooge as a young, middle-aged, and old man, and the three ghosts who haunt Scrooge.[5]
The 3D film was produced through the process of motion capture, a technique Zemeckis previously used in his films The Polar Express (2004) and Beowulf (2007).[5]
A Christmas Carol began filming in February 2008, and was released on November 3, 2009 by Walt Disney Pictures.[6] It received its world premiere in London, coinciding with the switching on of the annual Oxford Street and Regent Street Christmas lights, which in 2009 had a Dickens theme.[7][8]
The film was released in Disney Digital 3-D and was the first Disney movie in IMAX 3-D. It is also Disney's third film retelling of A Christmas Carol following 1983's Mickey's Christmas Carol and 1992's The Muppet Christmas Carol.

A Christmas Carol Movie Wiki

In 1844, Ebenezer Scrooge, a bitter and miserly old moneylender at a London counting house holds everything that embodies the joys and spirit of Christmas in contempt. He refuses to visit his cheerful nephew, Fred, at his Christmas dinner party with his family, and forces his underpaid employee
  Bob Cratchit to beg to take the day off for his own family. That night, Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley who had died seven years prior on Christmas Eve and is now forced to spend his afterlife carrying heavy chains that were forged from his own greedy ways. Marley warns Scrooge that he will suffer an even worse fate if he does not repent and foretells that he will be haunted by three spirits that will help guide him.
The first spirit is the Ghost of Christmas Past, which shows Scrooge visions of his own past that take place on or around the Christmas season, reminding Scrooge of how he ended up the avaricious man he is now.
A Christmas Carol  Movie Wiki