A Christmas Carol (2009)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Miser Ebenezer Scrooge is awakened on Christmas Eve by spirits who reveal to him his own miserable existence, what opportunities he wasted in his youth, his current cruelties, and the dire fate that awaits him if he does not change his ways. Scrooge is faced with his own story of growing bitterness and meanness, and must decide what his own future will hold: death or redemption.
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What critics compared A Christmas Carol to
As with his A Christmas Carol movie, Zemeckis paints himself into a digital corner by ignoring adults.
It's only the occasional unnatural look of the motion-capture animation that is still a stumbling block for producer Robert Zemeckis and the team that created "The Polar Express" and "A Christmas Carol."
The point of "performance capture animation " – the expensive process by which live actors are turned into semi-animated characters – entirely escapes me and is no more interesting here than in The Polar Express or Disney's A Christmas Carol, Robert Zemeckis's earlier uses of the technique.
In "The Polar Express," "Monster House," "Beowulf," "A Christmas Carol" and now "Mars Needs Moms," Zemeckis — also responsible for such cutting-edge special-effects films as "Forrest Gump" and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" — has pursued an apparently keen interest in "performance capture" or "motion capture" filmmaking, in which actors are photographed while covered in reflective markers, so their movements and expressions can be electronically tracked and then translated into computer-generated imagery, to create animated characters.
The results, as seen in Zemeckis’s previous mo-cap features A Christmas Carol, Beowulf and The Polar Express, can charitably be described as interesting, but they’re considerably short of enchanting.
Much like “The Polar Express” and “A Christmas Carol” before it, the Zemeckis-produced “Mars” fails to deliver emotional and comedic blows thanks to the dead-eyed mannequins standing in for characters.
I'm not one of those people with a knee-jerk disdain for motion capture (I enjoyed The Polar Express and loved Jim Carrey in A Christmas Carol), but in Tintin, the technique that renders all that movement so flowing and frictionless also makes the characters come off as if their souls were made of sponge.
Spielberg employs 3-D motion capture technology similar to what his contemporary, Robert Zemeckis, has used in his last three films (with results varying from the wonderful “The Polar Express” to the woeful “A Christmas Carol”).
The Zemeckis films: Polar Express, Beowulf and A Christmas Carol failed to create that photo realistic version of humanity, because trying to motion capture and animate real people in that photo realistic way just makes humans look plastic and dead behind the eyes.
From the much-ballyhooed problems of Robert Zemeckis’ earlier attempts (2004′s The Polar Express, 2009′s A Christmas Carol), the methodology has markedly improved.
The pair of surreal children's fantasies written by Charles "Lewis Carroll" Dodgson, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, have been adapted for cinema and television as often as any other work of English literature I can name outside of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol.
And when did A Christmas Carol ever shrink Scrooge down to size, like Alice in Alice In Wonderland ?
During this past decade, he has been preoccupied with legendary tales retold using motion-capture animation – The Polar Express, Beowulf, A Christmas Carol .
Director Robert Zemeckis (“Forrest Gump,” “Back to the Future,” makes a welcome return to live action after a 12-year detour to work on motion capture animation (“Beowulf,” “A Christmas Carol,” “Mars Needs Moms”).
After winning the Oscar for “Forrest Gump” in the mid-90s and making other critical darlings like “Castaway,” Zemeckis immersed himself in mo-cap digital animation with films like “Beowulf” and “A Christmas Carol.”
"Flight" is Robert Zemeckis's return to live-action filmmaking (his last was 2000's " Cast Away ") after three motion-capture animated features, 2004's " The Polar Express ," 2007's " Beowulf " and 2009's " A Christmas Carol ," and for a long time, the film provocatively questions who truly was at fault in regards to the plane crash.
In Flight, director Robert Zemeckis' first film in 12 years that isn't (thank God) one of those motion-capture endeavors (see his awful A Christmas Carol adaptation starring Jim Carrey), Washington's character of "Whip" Whitaker is seen in the early going snorting a line of coke and drinking booze as if it were Gatorade.
After a trio of underwhelming mo-cap adventures ( The Polar Express , Beowulf and A Christmas Carol ), director Robert Zemeckis shows us exactly what special effects should be used for – with a plane crash so visceral you’ll be reaching for the sick bag.
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A cavalcade of normal-sized British thespsamong them, Ian McShane (2010's " Case 39 "), Bob Hoskins (2009's " A Christmas Carol "), Ray Winstone (2011's " Hugo "), Nick Frost (2011's " Paul "), and Toby Jones (2011's " My Week with Marilyn ")are shrunken digitally to portray the dwarves, but it's so convincing one would never know it if they weren't already familiar with the actors.And then there's Charlize Theron (2011's " Young Adult "), who once again has put an unforgettable stamp on an indelible screen creation not easily forgotten.
Because – like the carriage chase that Robert Zemeckis plopped into last year’s “A Christmas Carol” – these centuries-old classic tales cry out for loud and obnoxious 21st century special effects.