It seemed inevitable that Robert Zemeckis would eventually dig his meat hooks into Dickens’s 1843 novella, and that Jim Carrey would play several roles in it, including literature’s curmudgeon par excellence, Ebenezer Scrooge. The book is teeming with cinematic possibilities. One can almost picture Zemeckis, chief practitioner of the 3-D performance capture technique known as mocap, eyeing it like a Christmas goose. Mocap is one of those contentious cinematic developments that seems to divide people into various camps. One camp will explain how it allows visually creative directors to maneuver the camera however they like within an abstract space, and is therefore a useful tool, akin to the Steadicam or the greenscreen. The other camp will maintain that the process is too easy, that it makes a mockery of traditional animation, and that it can’t replicate certain movements, especially those that don’t adhere to the laws of physics. There is yet another camp that takes the moral high ground, arguing that it has an almost satanic dehumanizing effect, turning actors into weird facsimiles of human beings and stifling any meaningful drama.  

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