A couple weeks back, I took a few students to a screening of Disney's version of A Christmas Carol. Now, I am no expert, but after teaching the novel for the last three years, viewing almost every film version, and reading two different versions for class, I feel like I could have been Dickens' personal assistant on the novel! Anyways, back to my review. The movie is what I would expect from Disney--it's entertaining and pleasing to the eye with a few moments of brilliance here and there. One of my many criticisms of Disney remakes is that they tend to down play some of the central themes (in this case, a character, at the expense of eye-candy). Disney's A Christmas Carol is a good film, don't get me wrong. The budget was well used and the digital graphics are amazing! More than anything, I was incredibly impressed with the fact that Disney opted to stick with most of the original language used in Dickens' novel. As many of my seventh graders can tell you, Dickens' language is sometimes hard to understand; it's over 150 years old! Amazingly, Disney not only kept the original language, but most of the time you don't even realize that Scrooge is talking in a language not familiar to the way people talk nowadays. For that, major kudos goes to Jim Carey and the actors for portraying their characters in a relevant manner, despite difficult language.
What I disliked, though, was that the character of Tiny Tim was nearly nonexistent. For me, that's a non-negotiable part. Without Tiny Tim, it's just not the same story.
