Disney's re-do is probably better the fewer times you've read, seen, or heard the story. With or without 3-D, this is nevertheless a lavishly, lovingly, and imaginatively illustrated edition of the Dickens holiday classic, in a graphic style congenial to a Victorian ghost story, and in a motion-capture computer-animation technique which director Robert Zemeckis has made his personal domain (The Polar Express, Beowulf, 2-D and 3-D respectively). There are amusingly recognizable caricatures, to go along with the voices, of Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, and Bob Hoskins, while Jim Carrey is sufficiently disguised by a pickax nose and scratch-awl chin, and by an acceptable British accent, so as to be no distraction. The guttering candle-flame head of the Ghost of Christmas Past is a marvelous effect, soon topped by the dissolving transparent floor in the airborne house piloted by the Ghost of Christmas Present. The Grim Reaper shadow of the Ghost of Christmas Future is not bad, but his section gives way to the grandiose spectacle of a chase by horse-drawn hearse, to say nothing of the spectacle of an Incredible Shrinking Scrooge, that rather tramples the gloom of the forecast. We don't want excitement there; we want despair. In the end, all the emphasis on the technology of the telling tends to outbalance the sentiment, such that there remains a bit of a chill even after Scrooge warms up. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd