I was given A Christmas Carol DVD to view and review. As I’ve never read the book I took the time to read it first so as to be more familiar with the story. When I came to watch the movie I found it reasonably faithful to the book.

In case you don’t know the story I’ll just give you a quick description. It is the story of Ebenezer Scrooge and how he was very tightfisted with his money, he wouldn’t give money to anyone for anything outside of his own small ideas and was only interested in making more. One Christmas Eve his partner who had died seven years previously came back to introduce three Ghosts to him. Against his better judgement he goes with these three Ghosts and learns much about his past, how he became so miserly and what is likely to happen to him should he continue in the same way. He takes the lessons well and changes his ways.

It has so many of the scenes Charles Dickens described so carefully detailed with much love and care. I did notice one scene that has been added in, it is well within context and helps to explain a later scene. This scene showing the young Ebenezer Scrooge dancing with a young lady, both enamoured with the other, is not in the book but a scene only a few pages later where the young lady is telling Scrooge she’s been supplanted by gold is there. I almost skipped that scene in the book at it is so very short and there is apparently no lead up to it so it does help to have them dancing, it puts it totally in context.

The movie is made with mocap which is a technique that consists of putting the actors in strange costumes totally unlike the costumes we see and painting lots of dots on their bare skin all of which help the computers to see the different parts. After filming the shots are then turned into animation, they’ve done such a great job you can often tell who the actor is. The actors often take more than one role. Jim Carrey plays Ebenezer Scrooge as well as the three Ghosts. Gary Oldman plays Bob Cratchitt and his son, I did wonder why they looked so much alike. Colin Firth plays Scrooge’s nephew. I very much enjoyed Bob Hoskins as Mr Fezziwig but then I like his acting. Many of the other cast played more than one role, something that’s very easy with the way this movie was made.

Walt Disney Studios have been very clever and released this as a value pack so you get a Blu-Ray disc as well as a DVD so you can play it now on your DVD player and then again later when you upgrade to Blu-Ray.

I do recommend you help your child read the book before viewing the movie. If they’re old enough then they can read it by themselves. I feel that this movie complements the book in so many ways. It shows us the things we can’t imagine from the book about how society used to look and act.

Warnings:
There are some scenes where Scrooge falls from great heights which had me worried despite knowing they were not real. I’m really not good with heights.

When you put DVD into the player it goes straight into the movie and afterwards goes straight into the extras. You can shortcut this by pressing the main menu button. The extras consist of one of the actors talking about the making of the movie with shots of how it works and some explanations of some of the techniques. The second one is one of the child actors showing and describing one of her days, the is lovely, the girl is a delight and you can see how excited she is to be doing this. The third extra is deleted scenes, they are all incomplete and the faces of the actors sometimes show through the animation which I feel might disturb younger children.