(RTTNews) - Because so many are familiar with the themes and story of "A Christmas Carol," it would have been very easy for a remake to be just a bland retelling of an old tale. But director Robert Zemeckis takes the strands of the classic work by Charles Dickens and spins it in a new direction, filling the screen with lavish visuals and creating an impressive reworking of the themes. "A Christmas Carol" plunges into dark territory and refuses to dumb it down simply because it is aimed at family audiences - a trait that plagues so many family features of today. With an A-list cast of voices and state-of-the-art animation technology, Disney's "A Christmas Carol" is an engaging holiday tale for older children and even for adults.

By now everybody knows of Ebenezer Scrooge, voiced here by Jim Carrey in what is a very good fit for his talents. Phrases like "Bah! Humbug!" have practically been ingrained in the psyche of the masses at this point, and nearly everyone is familiar with one of the many versions of the story. What people may have forgotten is how dark the original Dickens novel actually is, and the new version of "A Christmas Carol" doesn't shy away at all from intense sequences, including some that even border on the macabre. Scrooge is not simply a nice man who has lost his way but one so thoroughly calculating that he completely lacks the ability to express compassion of any sort. At the very beginning, after his long-time business partner dies, he plucks the coins placed over the eyes of the deceased in order to cover the expenses of the funeral arrangements.

The world Scrooge inhabits is one of beauty, though he doesn't notice anything outside of his expense reports. Zemeckis and his team of animators recreate the 19th century streets of London with striking clarity, and the setting itself is as much a character as Scrooge and the infamous three ghosts of Christmas. Scrooge's world is filled with frosty windowpanes, fog lingering over dark streets and snow that seems to trickle down from the heavens. With all the extravagance outside his window, though, Scrooge would rather waste away inside his mansion, so afraid of poverty that he is only willing to burn enough coal to keep from freezing to death.

As in previous versions, Scrooge is as cantankerous as can be and at one point early on he coolly sends away a mission worker trying to raise money for those less unfortunate. In Scrooge's eyes, the poor are a product of their own stupidity and he has little time to suffer fools who cannot take care of themselves. That he is part of the problem simply doesn't occur to him.

This of course all begins to change as he is haunted by three spirits early on Christmas morning. He watches painfully as he grows from a warm-hearted schoolboy to a cruel monster from one Christmas to the next. It is with the three ghosts that "A Christmas Carol" begins to take off as it delves deeply into the tragic nostalgia so embedded in the original tale. The spirits do not simply tell him that he is a bad man but show him in terrifying detail. Sometimes, he cannot even bare to watch the sins of his past, so agonizing they are.

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