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FIRST LOOK

First Look: Jim Carrey as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol

by Alex Billington
May 18, 2009

First Look: Jim Carrey as Scrooge in Disney's A Christmas Carol

Okay, technically speaking, this isn't our very first look at Jim Carrey in this, since we featured the poster with him on it last week, but it is the first official photo. Disney has released the following photo from Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol, showing Jim Carrey as Ebenezer Scrooge encountering a ghost. The trailer is set to debut by the end of this month sometime, and will most likely show in front of Pixar's Up starting on May 29th. One new photo isn't going to make me excited, I'm waiting for some actual footage. Stay tuned for more updates and the trailer for Disney's A Christmas Carol coming in the next few weeks!

Click the photo below to see a full-size version of the rendered shot from Zemeckis' latest CGI feature.

A new 19-second promo clip from A Christmas Carol has also debuted, and can be seen below courtesy of Trailer Addict. This is our first real glimpse at any finished footage from the film as well. Thoughts?

An animated retelling of Charles Dickens' classic about a Victorian-era miser named Ebenezer Scrooge who is taken on a journey of self-redemption, courtesy of several mysterious Christmas apparitions.

A Christmas Carol is both written and directed by filmmaker extraordinaire Robert Zemeckis, of everything from Back to the Future to Who Framed Roger Rabbit to Forrest Gump to Contact to his past CGI movies The Polar Express and Beowulf previously. This is based on Charles Dickens' classic story. Jim Carrey stars at least four different characters, alongside of Gary Oldman, Robin Wright Penn, Colin Firth, Cary Elwes, and Bob Hoskins. Disney will debut A Christmas Carol in theaters everywhere on November 6th.

Explore tags: First Look, Hype, Photos

Timothy

that ghost hand looks like video game quality, too bad, maybe it'll look better in motion.
Trey

lol @ # 1
Joshi

The entire thing looks like video game quality... and a bad video game at that. It's early days yet, maybe this isn't fully rendered, and we haven't seen anything in motion yet, but this picture is... well not good.
dom

Given how technically amazing Zmeckis's other 3D films are (Story is another quesiton!!) this one definitely looks weak.
Fuelbot

That looks awful. Is it just me or does it seem like Robert Zemeckis is using performance capture completely wrong? It seems, if it's all gonna be animated anyway, that anything is truly possible and yet he makes films that could've been made with real people and standard CGI.
Timothy

This better get a whole lot better by Christmas (they do have a long time for more rendering) or else it's just gonna be bad, which would be sad.
http://www.theaterhopper.com Tom Brazelton

Zemeckis is trying to put lightning in a bottle twice. Really, Robert? ANOTHER Christmas-themed mocap picture. Look, we all know Beowulf didn't go over, but it's too soon to go back to the well on this one.
MB

What the article fails the mention is that this is the first Zemeckis animated feature produced at his studio, Image Movers Digital, instead of Sony as his previous movies were. That could explain the look difference quite a bit.
http://www.bleepinggeek.com Pete the Geek

The problem with Zemeckis' 3D projects is that there's always a weird "deadness" around the eyes of the characters, he doesn't spend enough time making the 3D cameras act like traditional cameras, and the stories are always hit'n'miss. On a real film, you'd never be able to pick out unnecessary textural details like every bump on the wall behind him, or the texture on his cap. Having that level of hyper-reality always pulls the audience out of the moment and tells your brain "this is fake". If he wanted to make some really groundbreaking films, he should work harder on having a fully realized story, hire a character animator to really make those eyes "pop" with life, and realize that just because you CAN do something with 3D, doesn't mean you SHOULD.
Josh

that looks awful. dead. as do all of his motion capture movies. the characters aren't pondered over and given passion in movement. They are "captured" and then "animated". They will always look dead this way. Pixar somehow manages to make their animations in which they use NO motion capture look more alive than anyone else even gets close to learn from them
mandarin

Another one? Yesh, another crap over and over again during Xmas time
Greedo the Rodian

I'd rather just see a live-action w/CGI version. When I heard about this, I just figured it was Carrey doing what he did in Lemony Snicket. If you're gonna capture live action, just film in live action. Also, I've kinda had enough with the Christmas Carol story. From a Disney version, all of the traditional versions, the book, the Bill Murray version, multiple sitcoms that have used the conceit... it's not like the story is gonna be any fresher or anything.
Dylan

I amazed at how bad this looks.
http://myspace.com/iampaigey Paigey!

Ew. Uncanny Valley much?
Joshi

What I don't get is what Zemeckis is even doing this with mo-cap. There have been loads of live action movies based on A Christmas Carol and at no point in any of them have I thought "Man, this would be so much better if they'd used computers". I mean it's a very grounded story, it's not like Beowulf where you need someone to ride a dragon or whatever, this is simply, guy meets ghosts one night, sees some stuff that's fairly unextraordinary and he's a better man for it. I mean Zemeckis has, for no reason at all, decided to use mo-cap for a character movie.
Timothy

The footage actually looks quite a bit better than the shot, so I'm cautiously optimistic about this.
http://www.graphic.it/flavioblog FlaWiio

Oh please Disney, You already own Muppet Christmas Carol that is a work of art...
http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/4120/sppunx06oa5.jpg Crapola

weird and crap looking
N.

looks alright but hopefully jim carrey can pull it off or at least better than tom hanks did in polar express.
Brian

this looks cool
Donna

All I can say is, that I just got back from seeing a short video on it that is going around the country with the Train, and if you see this on a big screen, and with the 3-D glasses, you'll change your mind. It is pretty amazing. The video clip on this site doesn't remotely do it justice.
http://bungi.net luke

it just look like game quality be cause almost every good 3d animated movie look that like ffIX and tons more its just because of the pictures dont judge tell u see it
http://bungi.net luke

i think it just the ghost i mean scrooge look pretty good but i just think it just that one ghost
Phoebe Fothergill

What gave Charles Dickens the idea to create scrooge?