Disney’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ a darkly touching story

It’s more ominous than any specter haunting Scrooge. Director-writer-producer Robert Zemeckis gives us the Ghost of Movies Yet to Come: his motion-capture version of the classic Charles Dickens 1843 novella about holiday redemption. “Disney’s A Christmas Carol” turns out to be a surprisingly faithful and still relatable retelling. Though in order to show off the technology’s eye-popping potential, combined with an inherent Victorian darkness preserved from the original piece, the intensity of this family film may have parents of younger children saying, “Bah, humbug.”

Zemeckis’ 3-D animation advances the technique he introduced in “Beowulf” (2004) and “The Polar Express” (2007). It captures with sensors the performances of the actors, then places cartoon-ized renderings of them in a wholly digital environment, including costumes, sets and otherwise logistically impossible camera shots. This allows the filmmaker maximum control and infinite creative possibilities. But the visual result imparts a weird artificiality. It’s a purgatory neither as human and tangible as photorealism nor as fully fantastical and colorful as regular animation.

Still, this “Carol” maintains the formal dialogue, period appointments, melodrama and moving message of the source material. And it heightens it with beautiful CGI tableaus of a twinkling, snow-covered London.

Jim Carrey voices the penny-pinching, unfeeling Ebenezer Scrooge. The notorious curmudgeon dismisses the plight of the poor and sneers at his cheerful nephew Fred (Colin Firth), his underpaid clerk Bob Cratchit with the crippled little son (both voiced by Gary Oldman), and Christmas spirit.

Then, one Christmas Eve, Scrooge is visited by the suffering specter of his late business partner Marley (Oldman) and the ghosts of Christmases past, present, and yet to come (all by Carrey). The protagonist faces his sinfulness and mortality and is reborn into kindness, generosity, and love. For today’s apprehensive recessionary era — as in stark mid-19th-century England — the uplifting parable remembers what in life has true value.

The last ghost visitation has Scrooge in a literal chase to elude a relentless, shadowy Grim Reaper. Belonging more in an action movie or a special effects demonstration than a traditional holiday tale, the incongruous, graphic sequence goes on too long and may be inappropriately scary for some kids. Thankfully, such excesses are few.

The performances are effective, even poignant — even if you can’t always tell how much credit goes to the actors versus the computers. But, God Bless us everyone, through any medium, Tiny Tim never fails to jerk a tear.