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Christmas in

Motion Capture

Amy Evans

Robert Zemeckis’s catalogue of films is a mixed bag: his most recent film was The Witches (2020), which has received mixed reviews, and caused controversy around the presentation of people with limb differences. He is probably best known for films like Back to the Future (1985), as well as his foray into the world of motion capture in the 2000s. Two Christmas films were made by Zemeckis during that period — The Polar Express (2004) and A Christmas Carol (2009), the former being one of my favourite films for the festive season. At the same time, it is undeniable that both films, whether or not by design, veer into the uncanny.

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Zemeckis’s use of technology was ground-breaking at the time, as The Polar Express was the first film to be fully shot using performance capture; but something just didn’t quite work. A closer look at A Christmas Carol would easily reveal what that might be. Going through the film’s making-of footage, or its unfinished deleted scenes, it is amazing to see the process behind how the performances of actors, all wearing motion capture suits and being captured by specialist cameras, are used to create an animated film.

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But despite the impressive technique, the verisimilitude of characters’ looks, combined with the film’s palpable dark tone, means that A Christmas Carol lacks lightness and holiday spirit, qualities which make The Polar Express appeal to families. The detailed visuals in A Christmas Carol show that technology had advanced in the five years between Zemeckis’s two holiday season features. Yet the imbalance between style and story shows how a preoccupation with using specific technologies can negatively impact a film.

The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol seem to have been made with the same formula in mind. Both films have Zemeckis’s frequent collaborator Alan Silvestri as composer, use performance capture, and have one actor (Tom Hanks and Jim Carrey respectively) take up multiple main roles. But as both films left critics and audiences divided, I wonder whether it was perhaps not the best idea to try and replicate elements from The Polar Express in A Christmas Carol: not only are the stories and tones very different, the latter has been adapted for cinema so many times that any new attempt must undergo scrutiny, and would be looked upon unfavourably unless it was really exceptional. Zemeckis would likely have been better off adapting another children’s book like The Polar Express, as this could have given him a better shot at creating something that feels at least new, if not innovative.

The 2000s seems to have been the peak of motion-capture animated film - with Zemeckis at the helm. Alongside his Christmas films, he also made Beowulf (2007), and served as a producer on Monster House (2006) and Mars Needs Moms (2011), all of which feature performance capture. While the critically acclaimed Avatar (2009) uses the same technique heavily, the difference lies in its intention to look real rather than animated. Now, motion capture seems to be most often used in live action films for special effects or particular non-human characters, such as in the Avengers films. The use of performance capture for animated films seems to have gone out of fashion. It’s a shame that they didn’t quite take off in the way that Zemeckis wanted, and it certainly wasn’t due to a lack of love and dedication put into these films, as the behind-the-scenes footage testifies. Although I still love The Polar Express, I’d rather leave the uncanniness of A Christmas Carol out of my vacation viewing.

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