REVIEW: New 'Christmas Carol,' brings out Dicken's dark wonders

I confess I walked into “Disney’s A Christmas Carol” with a stern message for Robert Zemeckis: “Put down the digital crayons and start making big-boy movies again!”

The director of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” “Back to the Future,” “Contact” and “Forrest Gump,” Zemeckis has ridden his career to a different course over the past several years with completely computer-generated, motion-capture films such as “The Polar Express” and “Beowulf.” However, the critic who swaggered into the theater left humbled and contrite.

While I would still like to see Zemeckis revisit the real world, there is no denying that he still possesses the ability to conjure pure magic. The classic story of ghosts, time travel and redemption is one of the most familiar in the English language — so much so that it is amazing that Zemeckis and his team manage to infuse it with something new and fresh. Ebenezer Scrooge (Jim Carrey) is a miserly, misanthropic curmudgeon who is visited by three spirits — the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future (also Carrey) — who show him where he’s lost his soul and where he might find it again.

In a very real sense, this version of “A Christmas Carol” is the most faithful to Charles Dickens’ original text ever filmed. It’s not merely due to the fact that almost all the dialogue is taken word for word from the original novella, but the film understands, in a way we’ve never seen before, that this is largely a ghost story, a haunted house thriller, and it addresses these aspects of the story as a genuine horror film might, nearly devoid of the comic, cartoonish sensibilities that have become the norm in every other incarnation.

When the ghosts show up in Scrooge’s bed chambers, they are genuinely terrifying. While this proves to be a simple yet spellbinding interpretation, the nightmarish images do complicate things considerably for the viewing audience. If children are Disney’s target audience, many of them, particularly the youngest, will find the context too dark and horrifying.

Despite all of that, “Disney’s A Christmas Carol” is still an exuberant, high-spirited, frolicking thrill ride that blossoms from darkness to light with exactly the sort of mirth and merriment one would expect from the oft-told tale. The movie (and without question its director) is in love with its visual effects. When the camera soars over Victorian London, a la Peter Pan, the sensation is nothing short of breathtaking.

It won’t be long until the “uncanny valley” — the industry term used to describe the perceived gulf between reality and computer-generated realism — is bridged. You can see it falling away already. I recently spoke to one of the animators who worked on “Disney’s A Christmas Carol” and he said that in order to meet deadlines, animators were forced to concentrate all their time and energy on the main characters.

The gulf between the two is obvious, but rather than detract from the film, the crudely drawn characters actually make the main characters look that much more extraordinary by comparison.

GRADE: A

DISNEY’S A Christmas Carol

Cast: Voices of Jim Carrey, Robin Wright Penn, Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Bob Hoskins, Cary Elwes

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Theaters: Cinemark IMAX, Cinemark, Gold Hill, Hollywood, Carmike, Chapel Hills

Industry rating: PG (for scary sequences and images)

Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes