Ebeneezer Scrooge (Luke Evans) is a cold hearted miser who makes no secret of his contempt for the holidays as he runs his moneylending services with no room for compassion or humanity. Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his deceased partner, Jacob Marley (Jonathan Pryce) who is now condemned to wander the Earth in the shackles he forged in life and tells Scrooge that a similar fate awaits him with an even longer and heavier chain. Marley offers Scrooge a chance to avoid his fate by telling him three ghosts, the Ghosts of Christmas Past (Olivia Colman), Present (Trevor Dion Nicholas), and Future who show Scrooge his long forgotten past, its effects on those in the here and now, and what may happen if he continues on his course unaltered.
Scrooge: A Christmas Carol is yet another adaptation of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. The film is produced by Timeless Films a UK based production company that specializes in low to mid budget animated features often produced as co-productions with China or Germany. Scrooge: A Christmas Carol marks the company's third film to debut on Netflix as an original following previous releases such as Pets United, Dragon Rider (aka Firedrake The Silver Dragon), and Extinct. The film is written and directed by Stephen Donnelly whose previous directorial effort was the direct-to-video animated film Monster High: Welcome to Monster High, but more commonly works as an art director such as the Timeless produced TV series Lost in Oz. The film takes inspiration from the 1970 musical Scrooge written by Leslie Bricusse (to whom the film is dedicated) who also wrote the 1967 Doctor Dolittle as well as assisted in the music for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with as well as credits across several other projects before his death in 2021. While Scrooge: A Christmas Carol indulges in a few well worn tropes of mainstream animated fare, this honestly isn't a bad revisit of Scrooge.
While the movie doesn't have the budget of larger studio produced animations being a smaller European production, the movie looks good for what it is and features some solid design work, character models, and smooth movements. Luke Evans makes for a solid take on Scrooge not playing it quite up to the level of over-the-top that Albert Finney did in the original take on the musical material in 1970, but Evans strikes a nice balance between the over the top pageantry of something like this as well as the more subtle character moments with a particularly well staged scene in Scrooge's past where his lost love sees his cruelty during a debt collection which leads to a really strong song "Life Never Came" which is one of the new songs that Bricusse wrote and contributed prior to his passing and it's a really solid sequence both in terms of animation, music, and performances by Luke Evans and Jessie Buckley. The movie also features revisits and remixes of songs that previously appeared in the 1970 film also written by Bricusse such as "I Like Life", "Thank You Very Much", "The Beautiful Day", and "I'll Begin Again". The rest of the cast is very good across the board with Johnny Flynn strong as Bob Cratchit, Olivia Colman very good as the Ghost of Christmas Past, and Trevor Dion Nicholas playing a very large personality as The Ghost of Christmas present that certainly fits with his performance, but Dion Nicholas also played the Genie in a west end production of Disney's Aladdin stage musical and it does feel like the movie is trying to capture that to a degree.
The movie remixes various elements of the Dickens story as well as the original layout of the 1970 film so even though familiar beats are struck throughout the film, there are differences in details and delivery that are quite unique. One of the elements they do is change Scrooge's relationship with his nephew by incorporating a reason why Scrooge holds him at a distance which recontextualizes an element from other versions of this story such as the George C. Scott one from 1984 and for the most part I think it's done very well. The movie also tries to extend the link between Bob Cratchit and Scrooge by creating an additional encounter in the past and I think it mostly works. In terms of aesthetics, the ghosts are all well designed with the transition between Ghost of Christmas Present to Ghost of Christmas Future a particularly memorable and unique take on the ghosts that I did like. Some elements such as the inclusion of Scrooge's pet dog Prudence or impish creatures called Cheerlings that seem like they go to the minion school of animated assets did seem a little out of place and didn't really add all that much, but I've seen those kind of elements incorporated more poorly (looking at you King and I 1999) and their inclusion here isn't all that distracting luckily.
Scrooge: A Christmas Carol is an enjoyable mid budget animated take on the classic Christmas story that features some decent revisits of the songs by the late great Leslie Bricusse and a strong cast who add effort and energy to the material. In terms of its placement among the many tellings of this story, I'm not quite sure where I'd rank this, but I'd probably be more inclined to revisit this than some larger scale versions of this story like the Robert Zemeckis "rollercoaster" 3D approach he did with Jim Carrey or the three hour Steven Knight miniseries that upped the darkness and taboo material largely suffocating the themes of redemption. If you like the fun pageantry of something like the 1970 Scrooge, you'll find a lot to appreciate here with it.
