Fused Film: A Look At 3D IMAX With A Christmas Carol Is It A Gimmick or Evolution?

Fused Film takes a look at the technology of Disney’s A Christmas Carol, director Robert Zemeckis’ motion-capture re-telling of the classic Charles Dickens tale.

Remember when you got that guitar (or keyboard or whatever) on Christmas when you were a kid? It was perfectly ok for you to spend a few days experimenting with all of the noises you could make with your new toy…no matter how cacophonous the result. After a while though, people want to hear those noises tamed and used in the service of an actual song. We get it: feedback can be harnessed as a musical tool. Ok, play a song with that (and now, just about every rock song does.) I would like to think that we are beginning to reach a similar tipping point with both CGI and 3-D.

The introduction of a new technology to the world of storytelling always seems to produce an era when the storytellers chase the technology around instead of letting the technology serve the story. The irony of all this is that a truly great storyteller is able to make the audience forget that they are an audience at all. They become lost in the fictional world as they momentarily lose track with reality. This is the reason we plunk down 10 bucks at the theater: escape. (Did you just find yourself internally reading that as “es-cah-pay?” – yeah, movies have no impact on us at all.) But with the director poking us in the ribs every few minutes with a “THIS MOVIE IS IN 3-D! GET IT?” moment, we keep getting alerted to the reality that we are, in fact, sitting in a fairly uncomfortable, crowded theater.

I got the distinct impression in watching A Christmas Carol with Jim Carrey that Robert Zemeckis fell into this trap. An exhilarating opening sequence in which the audience is whisked over the rooftops of 19th Century London was an entertaining way of setting the scene. But such moments were often followed by technological overkill. A particularly jarring case-in-point was when the ghost of Scrooge’s late business partner Jacob Marley shows up in what could have been a genuinely frightening scene. But when Marley’s jaw breaks off leaving the apparition rather speech-impaired, Zemeckis and Carrey seem to be reaching for humor. Before the advent CGI, taking this scene in that direction would have been technically impossible. As it is, it was technically flawless, but artistically wrong-headed and was a huge distraction from the moment.

Ironically, while being snapped back into reality by over-the-top effects there were still some aspects of the movie where the limitations of the current technology were just as distracting. For instance, the problem with using CGI in an attempt to create realistic humans (unlike Pixar, who keeps them intentionally “cartoony”) is that the technology is simply not quite there yet. The skin is remarkably better than it was just a few years ago (specifically on the primary characters,) but there is something missing with the eyes. Sometimes I felt like I was at Disneyland in the Hall of Presidents watching animatronic characters.

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