Christmas Carol: The Movie
**
Cinema
Releases - December 7, 2001
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate U. 80 minutes.
Directed by Jimmy T. Murakami. Written by Piet Kroon, Robert Llewellyn; from
the novel by Charles Dickens. With the voices of Simon Callow, Kate Winslet,
Nicolas Cage, Jane Horrocks, Rhys Ifans, Juliet
Stevenson.
Kate Winslet provides one of the voices in
"Christmas Carol: The Movie", and I just love it when the words
'Kate Winslet' appear in a movie's openings credits. Aah, they're the most
perfect words in the English language. And they're kinda the high point of
this film.
"Christmas Carol: The Movie" tells the classic
Dickens story of Ebenezer Scrooge through the eyes of a couple of annoying,
squeaky little mice, in pretty lousy animation. The cartoonists have given
us dull, undetailed drawings, and the animators have brought them to life
with the bare minimum of movement. It's like a bad Japanese comic book with
grey ink spilled over the top and insects crawling over it.
The voice-over performances are stiff, and director
Jimmy Murakami has arranged things in a functional manner, so the movie is
lacklustre, restrained and flavourless. What this results in, though, is
ultimate proof of the great structural and moral strength of Dickens's original
tale -- "Christmas Carol: The Movie" ends up being involving despite the
clumsy filmmaking. This is about as bad as a version of "Christmas Carol"
could be, which turns out to be not very bad at all.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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