A Christmas Carol (1971)

              I’m wondering if there’s a more pervasive, retold story in Western civilization than ‘A Christmas Carol.’  We have a few definitive versions of it by this point, whether you want it told straight (the 1951 film starring Alastair Sim) or comedically (1992’s ‘The Muppet Christmas Carol’) or animatedly (1983’s ‘Mickey’s Christmas Carol’) or subversively (1988’s ‘Scrooged.’)  We even got a sarcastic one just this year with the Reynolds-Ferrell team up ‘Spirited,’ although I don’t think anyone is arguing that that one is definitive of anything except maybe exhaustion.

              About the only interesting thing about an adaptation at this point is what parts they do or don’t include or what high-concept spin they put on it.  The interesting text is the metatext, not the story itself but the way it’s told.  My usual complaint with adaptations is that the story isn’t long enough for a full 90-minute feature film without some serious padding.  When the padding is well done and charming, like when you stick a bunch of Muppets in the frame and let them do their thing for 86 minutes, it’s great.  When you keep just the important parts, center it around Scrooge McDuck, and keep it around 26 minutes, it’s just fine.  Even Sim kept it under 90 minutes. 

              So this version’s runtime of 25 minutes should be completely workable, depending on what they cut.  The Disney version got rid of a lot: the worldwide tour by Christmas Present to lighthouses and boats and such, the creepy kids under the Ghost’s robes, the scenes of people discussing his death, the stuff that doesn’t really fit in with the whole kid-friendly vibe.  The effect of this is to keep the story much more focused on the personal actions and redemption of Scrooge as a person and deemphasis the fairly stark criticism of capitalistic practices that gave the original a little bit of satirical bite.  This is as is expected of Disney even in its reduced 80’s state.  The metatext here becomes a large corporation producing a version of the story that focuses on personal redemption severed from any connection to a larger system that they themselves are a part of.  A Marxist reading of the short would be very easy, is what I’m saying.

              So what is the metatextual reading of this version?  That they didn’t want to make any decisions so instead crammed in as much as possible, making every moment as important as every other moment and therefore all equally unimportant.

              I was confused for the longest time about why this version seemed so rushed when I didn’t have the same problem with the almost identically long Disney version.  Then I went through and noted what was cut and what was emphasized in that telling and understood.  Until I looked it up I assumed the version with Scrooge McDuck was closer to 45 minutes but then I realized that it was simply paced better so didn’t seem like the speed-run version this is.  In many ways I’m being unfair to this special by comparing it to a known classic but director Richard Williams and lead animator Ken Harris deserve to be held in the same esteem as any Disney animator so I’m doing it anyway.

              Most people don’t know his name but a lot of them are very familiar with Williams’ work as he was the animation director for ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit.’  He also did the title sequences for the fourth and fifth Pink Panther movies and in cult circles he’s known as the mad genius behind the staggering undertaking that is the unfinished ‘The Thief and the Cobbler.’  With that background in mind, it becomes clear that the point of this special was to give the animators the opportunity to show off their techniques and give them something interesting to draw.  There isn’t even a credited writer on the special, it just lists Charles Dickens.  Someone took a highlighter to the text and then handed that off to the storyboard artists.

              That leads naturally to the next question: is the art any good?  I’m going to give a qualified yes.  It alternates between fairly realistic portrayals of humans and backgrounds during the opening and closing scenes with occasional stylistic flourishes during transitions (Scrooge walking home in empty blackness, charcoal sketches of London during the opening credits) and gets increasingly stylized during the ghost segments.  The designs here are fairly striking, from a mostly sketched-in Marley with a distended open mouth as he speaks to a Ghost of Christmas Past that seems to exist as a series of flickers slowly catching up to each other as they move.  The camera isn’t static, often moving within a scene so the figures shift to different perspectives, which can work really well when the animation can match the movement but can produce odd proportions when they can’t.  Fifty years ago they didn’t have computers to help work out the angles so they had to do it all by eye. 

              Since this special is essentially the flip-book version of the story, scenes coming and going in the blink of an eye often with no obvious relation to the scenes before or after them, any kind of coherent message is hard to piece together.  The death of Tiny Tim is given less screen time than a bunch of miners singing around a fireplace.  Christmas Present explaining Ignorance and Want are given more screen time than Scrooge breaking his engagement in the past.  They do a good job of establishing that Scrooge is a prick at the start and showing that he’s changed into a giggly nice guy at the end but the middle is such a clattering series of impressionistic scenes that it’s never clear exactly which points landed with Scrooge to get him to undergo this change.  The scene at Fezziwig’s exists but Scrooge isn’t shown reflecting on it in any way.  We see his fellow stockbrokers talking about his funeral but not Scrooge’s reaction.  It’s not that a viewer unfamiliar with the source material wouldn’t understand what’s going on, the narrative is still all there, they just likely wouldn’t get why it’s considered such a classic.

              It’s somewhat interesting to note that Alastair Sims reprises his role as Scrooge here and of course he’s very good, but he’s not asked to do anything new for the role.  Since the scenes are so brief his performance is squeezed in between all the transitions and he doesn’t get a chance to do more than basically just read the lines.  The rest of the cast is fine in the few lines they get.  It’s all British character actors including Michael Redgrave, Diana Quick, and Melvyn Hayes.  It was produced in part by Chuck Jones Productions, aired on ABC tv, and was well-enough received that it was briefly released theatrically, qualifying it for an Oscar which it won for Best Animated Short Film of 1972, an award that caused controversy and led to the rule change that disqualified entries from debuting on television first, leading to all of the theatrical release shenanigans that Netflix and Apple perform each year to get their films eligible for the awards.

              This special has sort of the inverse problem as ‘Santa and the Three Bears,’ this could have been well-served by being stretched out over a longer runtime.  In the absence of that whoever adapted this should have made any decision about what to include other than “everything.”  Instead of an adaptation this is a Cliffnotes version, a speedreading summation of the mail plot points with no time to emphasize any part of it to show why this story is being told or what it’s trying to say.  In a good adaptation of the source material you need to feel some kind of fondness for Ebeneezer Scrooge, or at least understand why he started the story the way he did and why he’s changed at the end of it.  In the good version we get all of that: by the end of “The Muppet Christmas Carol” I want nothing more than to give Michael Caine a big ol’ hug.  At the end of “Scrooged” Bill Murray has changed from charmless asshole to affable asshole, and we love him for it.  “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” does such a good job with Scrooge McDuck he got his own tv series just four years later.  At the end of this one I’m just slightly impressed at the efficient way they rattled off the story points and hopeful that the animators enjoyed all the different ways they got to draw ghosts and Victorian London.