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Scrooge (Jim Carrey) watches Belle (Robin Wright Penn) share a moment with his younger self in “Disney’s Christmas Carol.” |
PTiny Tim looks like one of the malevolent young aliens from “Village of the Damned.”
Bob Cratchit looks like one of the innocent bystanders you accidentally shoot during a Wii action video game. So does Scrooge’s nephew Fred.
The characters in Robert Zemeckis’ 3-D animated adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic story “A Christmas Carol” still possess the strange and creepy qualities that haunted the cast of Zemeckis’ 2004 holiday hit “The Polar Express.”
Mostly, it’s the characters’ lifeless, unfocusing eyes that Zemeckis’ motion-capture computer animators haven’t been able to humanize.
Not yet.
And that small detail becomes extremely important in a movie where your heart is supposed to swell when Tiny Tim exclaims, “God bless us, everyone!” and not appear as if he might chow down on Scrooge’s ear.
Jim Carrey, who has made a career out of performing live-action cartoons, supplies a radically un-Carrey sound to Scrooge, whose raspy voice recalls Alastair Sim, who immortalized the role in the 1951 classic “Scrooge.”
Carrey voices the younger versions of his main character, as well as the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. (Read more…)