A CHRISTMAS CAROL: The Eyes Have It

Director Robert Zemeckis is still mastering his animation craft but I'll give him this - he's sure got the eyes right.

His 2004 release, THE POLAR EXPRESS, was an ambitious leap forward for motion-capture animation. A big name star, Tom Hanks, headlined a big-budget film version of a classic children's Christmas book ... all in the service of a method of animation that was still in its infancy. Earnest it definitely was, but THE POLAR EXPRESS had a waxen look that made the characters seem more mannequin than human.

But since animation is almost always a kind of visual reduction, the oddly ethereal pallor of the people in EXPRESS was not the film's downfall. After all, that pallor could define its own aesthetic. No, the problem was in the eyes. Since motion-capture depends on actors wearing sensors (or markers) all over their bodies, and eyeballs can't really accommodate sensors, there was a disturbing disconnect between the animated characters and their animated eyes. And if eyes really are the windows into the soul, then the world of THE POLAR EXPRESS seemed inhabited by soul-less zombies. Even Santa Claus. Now that might make for a nice holiday-themed horror film from the likes of George Romero, but I seriously doubt that was Zemeckis' ambition. Instead of heart-warming fare, the director dished up cold comfort - all those kids riding the Express were positively creepy with their glazed stares.

THE POLAR EXPRESS was supposed to be chilly because of the physical setting, not the emotional one. But it's hard to bond when you feel like you're in the Overlook Hotel instead of the North Pole.

Five years later, Zemeckis is back with another Christmas classic (you don't get much bigger than Dickens' A CHRISTMAS CAROL) and another big star, Jim Carrey .... in another big-budget motion-capture animated film. And while far from a perfect movie, DISNEY'S A CHRISTMAS CAROL does perfect the look in the eyes that proved so troublesome earlier. In fact, so good is the technology that not only does Zemeckis get the eyes right, he raises the stakes even higher by having Bob Cratchit actually tear up and cry out of them. And it looks exactly right. I'm convinced Zemeckis does that for no other reason than to show off, and given how much grief he got over those EXPRESS eyes, I don't begrudge him one bit.

Unfortunately, there's more to great filmmaking than mastering the technology - and it's on that score that Zemeckis is still learning. Yes, the main characters are much more precisely "drawn" - the face of Carrey's Scrooge for instance is a marvel of detail and visual nuance - and the characters' eyes no longer distract us. But technical wizardry can't quite compensate for the movie's lack of emotional charge. The characters may "look" more like real people than ever before but without a better and more nuanced script they're never going to convince us they really are.

In the end, Zemeckis seems more interested in making Cratchit cry realistic 3-D tears than he is in giving the audience a reason to shed a few of their own. That's a bit like singing all the right notes of a Christmas carol but missing its meaning.