Canto di Natale - Il film

I just want to start off saying I adore the story A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, it is timeless and alongside The Nutcracker it is for me the quintessential Christmas story. There are some good, great even, versions of this classic, the Alastair Sim film(up there with It's a Wonderful Life) as the ultimate Christmas film, the George C. Scott film and Muppet Christmas Carol.

I wish I could add this film to the list of great versions, but sadly, I can't. For me, this is the worst version. However, it is not a complete embarrassment. Simon Callow is good as Charles Dickens and as Ebeneezer Scrooge, and the live-action opening scene is one of two good scenes the other being the Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come sequence, Kate Winslet is charming and touching as Belle and of the soundtrack(which I quite liked) What If and the Charlotte Church song are the standouts.

I really wanted to like it, but I did wish Christmas Carol:The Movie- the ghastly, uninspired title alone is just one of the problems- wasn't so lifeless and dull. Two things especially made it so. One was the quality of the animation, the look of the film does look drab with flat colours, with the background art lacking fluidity and the character designs looking quite dated. The other is the storytelling despite the core of the story being there, the fact that there were changes didn't bother me actually, it's just that some especially the anthropomorphic mice were unnecessary, overly cute and interrupted the flow of the story far too much. The romantic subplot took too long to get going too, and the Walking in the air-like sequences are some of the film's better scenes visually but they too drag the story down to a lesser extent.

While there is the odd dialogue lifted from the book, most of it feels dumbed down and juvenile as if to appeal more to children or those who haven't read the story, which is what I felt similarly about most of the subplots. The voice cast Callow and Winslet aside are disappointing. They are talented but their dialogue is lacking. Jane Horrocks and Michael Gambon are fine actors and do fit into their roles well enough, it's just that the writing and storytelling disallows them into doing anything particularly special with them. The worst by far is Nicolas Cage, who doesn't work at all as Jacob Marley sounding very bored and monotone throughout.

In conclusion, two or three good things aren't enough to save this film. 3/10 Bethany Cox

This starts off with a live action sequence where Charles Dickens played by Simon Callow attends a venue in Boston where he relates the story of A Christmas CAROL . I wonder if Callow could have believed that a few years later he'd be reprising his role as Dickens where he attends a similar type of speaking tour in Cardiff in 1869 where one of the audience is a corpse taken over by a gaseous alien race called The Gelth ? Check out The DOCTOR WHO story The Unquiet Dead to see what I'm blabbering on about . It's certainly very interesting to see how the scenes from the two are very similar in atmosphere

As you might expect this a straight forward retelling of A Christmas CAROL in animated form so if you're expecting lines like " Pity The Gelth - We want your flesh " you're going to be bitterly disappointed . Some people may complain that the story concentrates far too much on a social political subtext but Dickens didn't write A Christmas CAROL as a ghost story , he wrote it as a story of redemption and this shines through , though perhaps a little too obviously to be truly successful . My only real complaint is that the mice are a serious distraction to the story telling

I've probably seen every version of "A Christmas Carol" ever done. It's probably my favorite story. It's about pain and suffering and redemption. It's a wonderful ghost story. It has great characters and a great deal of sentimentality. It take a really good actor to pull off the character of Scrooge. Alaister Sim and George C. Scott are my favorites. The character has to have a link to an unhappy past. Cruelty is one thing, but we need some humanity as well. If he is not complex, he is nothing. This had potential. It has very nice animation. The problem, for me, is that Scrooge is too young. He has the angular face of a forty year old. His lines are delivered without any underlying emotion. I don't think the people doing the voices did much homework. Also, what's wrong with the original plot. Do people change it so they can put their own signature on it. This one isn't too bad, but it's so wooden. Those mice are also really annoying. If one wanted to take this to its logical end, London at that time, was overrun with disease ridden vermin, which did decrease the surplus population. Now, I know that's really harsh to these two little guys, but I would imagine that Scrooge would have as soon flattened them with a boot as look at them. You either make a commitment to tell the story, or you throw the whole thing out an ignore the elements. The mice should go. There's also a group of social issues that are just dropped in. All in all, however, it seems so lacking in pizazz. There is supposed to be elation at the end; even giddiness. There is nothing giddy about this film.

Darcel, Pam etc are - or were - the Solid Gold Dancers ("Solid Gold" was an American pop music show in the 1980s); in the movie "Scrooged" six of them (guess which two were absent) made a cameo appearance as part of the cast of Bill Murray's TV version of the classic Charles Dickens story... and there's the biggest problem with "Christmas Carol: The Movie" right there. Not the presence of leggy, gorgeous American girls in skimpy attire - such a thing could only have benefitted this movie - but the stunningly definitive and frankly ignorant title; so all the other versions of the novel (and there have been quite a few down the years, featuring casts from Alastair Sim through Henry Winkler [in the TV movie "An American Christmas Carol"] to Michael Caine in "The Muppet Christmas Carol" - not to mention the musical "Scrooge," at least two animated versions, and countless episodes of TV shows borrowing the whole story, like "WKRP In Cincinnati" and "The Odd Couple" to name but two) don't count then?

For a movie to live up to such a title, it would have to be the best version ever, and this isn't. It isn't helped by having live-action bookends of the great man (played here by Simon Callow, also the voice of Ebenezer Scrooge) performing a dramatic reading of his book in Boston. Or by having a pair of mice throughout the movie as the closest things to soulmates the man has (cute animals should be left to Disney and Disney alone). Or by animation that's depressingly crude for the most part (it all looks like a poor 1970s TV show, with the exception of the journeys the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present take our "hero" on, where the movie really does come to life for a bit). Or by Piet Kroon and Robert "Kryten" Llewellyn's script, or Julian Nott's score (pains me to say it, but the songs from Kate Winslet and Charlotte Church are the highpoints).

And as for Nicolas Cage as Jacob Marley... not since the late lamented Lorenzo Music did Peter Venkman on "The Real Ghostbusters" has there been such a shockingly bad case of cartoon miscasting. And some people wonder why so many of us love Pixar.

I quite much liked this version. I know that the story of Ebenezer Scrooge has been filmed many times but I don't care about that because of the moral point of this story. And hey, how many Dracula movies are out there?

The old-time animation was excellent and invigorating as I am quite bored with many modern day dull computer animations.

Mice were an excellent spice in the story. It looks like that many hate those mice and that they're not part of the story but hopefully everybody remembers Charles Dickens' lines in the start of the movie that this is not a straight adaptation from the book. Perhaps he just added those mice while telling the story? To me, mice didn't steal the story to themselves. The moral story of the original book is still there. And there aren't a director who didn't add something to the movie nevertheless what book says.

The ghost parts of the movie were marvelously made (especially the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come -part).

All in all, a well-made animated movie.