Yahoo Movies has a featurette of A Christmas Carol (as far as I can tell, not on YouTube yet).
I haven’t really been meditating on a Christmas Carol much. The one thing I do like about its launch is that it is a far less hyped and anticipated one than The Polar Express. However, one hopes it is not like The Polar Express in any way, shape or form. The similarities are hard to ignore – one actor playing multiple parts, the Christmas theme and then the motion capture animation, which has improved greatly since The Polar Express. This will, no doubt, be one of the biggest hits of the year.
In terms of animation, and this ground has been covered before in reader comments, how much do animators respect the Zemeckis brand of motion capture anyway? Do they think it’s kind of cheating and that it isn’t really animation? The Academy, I dare say, needs to evolve to include some kind of award (they already do this, to an extent, with the Sci-Techs) for technological advances in narrative filmmaking on the level of the major awards at the Oscars.¬† Soon there will be more Gollum-like creatures to take notice of – part animation, part real actor – and there isn’t any way to acknowledge those performances currently.
