The Uncanny Valley in Disney's A Christmas Carol

Robert Zemeckis Tempts Fate Again With Mo-Cap Adaptation

Nov 5, 2009

As if the bastardization of the story elements weren't bad enough, Zemeckis undermines the drama in A Christmas Carol with his preferred medium: motion capture animation.

Not to ruin the holiday spirit or anything, but Zemeckis's mo-cap take on the Dickens classic is just a horrendous failure of approach and tone, in that the approach is wrong-headed and the tone is non-existent.

To Be or Not To Be a Cartoon -- The Uncanny Valley Conundrum in Zemeckis's Mo-Cap Work

Whatever emotion Zemeckis doesn't sap in his Looney Tunes-meets-Cliff Notes take on the story, the mo-cap takes care of. For all the advancements Zemeckis and Co. have made in the technology since the Uncanny Valley abomination, The Polar Express, the majority of the characters in A Christmas Carol still have that dead-body-brought-to-life feeling. In striving for photo-realism (because that makes sense for a cartoon, right?), Zemeckis gets flat emotion and lifelessness with a side of creepiness.

Even the Ghost of Christmas Present feels like a photo-realistic Silly Putty monster, breathed to half-life by some misguided Frankenstein filmmaker. Only Scrooge, with his exaggerated Jay Leno chin, manages to err close enough to cartoon for us to read him as a credible character capable of emotion and feeling. The rest of the mo-cap cast suffer from the aforementioned mo-cap zombie syndrome (Belle and Fan especially, but Fred is fairly awful as well).

Half the time, it's impossible to completely ascertain what emotion the characters are supposed to be projecting. Is Scrooge truly scared of Marley's ghost, or does he just need to go to the bathroom? Is Bob Cratchit mourning the loss of his son, or is he trying to remember when he last saw his wallet? The characters' expressions aren't quite as blank as they were in Zemeckis's last two mo-cap films (Polar Express and Beowulf). But whatever it is the computers are actually picking up, mo-cap still is totally inadequate in displaying the nuances of human emotion.

To make matters worse, Zemeckis only accentuates his characters' Uncanny qualities by placing these semi-real looking creations in deliberately cartoony circumstances. Watching Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig twirl through the air in complete weightlessness completely violates the simulacrum Zemeckis tries to establish elsewhere -- he mixes the language of cartoon and live action film without any semblance of consistency or success.

If There's Any Justification for A Christmas Carol, It Must Be In The Eye Candy

With great live action, cartoon and even Muppet versions of A Christmas Carol, there seems to be very little reason for Zemeckis to pillage yet another classic with his mo-cap approach to filmmaking (shudder at the thought of his planned take on Yellow Submarine). The amount of creative control mo-cap affords Zemeckis is understandably attractive, and for all the troubling aesthetic and philosophical issues mo-cap causes, it does provide some breathtaking imagery.

In live action, of course, Zemeckis couldn't have opened his film with a 13-minute sustained shot, darting through and above a wonderfully rendered London, elapsing seven Christmases ahead in time. But Brian Desmond Hurst wasn't able to do that either, and yet his film is revered as a classic while Zemeckis's will likely be forgotten within a few years (and if it isn't, then shame on all of us).

Apparently, it takes a little more than a few computers to capture the spirit of Christmas. Or maybe, just a little less.

VERDICT: Too dark and slow for little kids, too childish and blashphemous for older audiences, Zemeckis's A Christmas Carol is truly a case of something-for-nobody. One scene spits back Dickens verbatim, the next is stripped completely of content or context, but it all comes from the mouths of lifeless mo-cap cartoon-people.

It's not as unintentionally creepy as The Polar Express, but there is more than a bit of Night of the Living Dickens going on in Zemeckis's adaptation. With Yellow Submarine in Zemeckis's mo-cap sight lines, may goodwill in the hearts of all men prevent him from doing this again.

The copyright of the article The Uncanny Valley in Disney's A Christmas Carol in Hollywood Animated Films is owned by Zachary Herrmann. Permission to republish The Uncanny Valley in Disney's A Christmas Carol in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.