Advent Calendar 2017! - Day 13
Version: A Christmas Carol (1971, dir. Richard Williams)
We're now looking at an animated version of A Christmas Carol from two years after yesterday's entry and Scrooge still hasn't been given a fun animal sidekick. We'll get to the origin of that trope, I promise.
Surprisingly, this version of Scrooge is once again played by Alastair Sim who, unsurprisingly, gives a great performance in the role. The urchin on the other hand has a terrible voice. Or maybe just a terrible design. Either way, what we hear doesn't match what we see at all. He looks like a young Dickensian urchin but he sounds like he could be 20. The animation in general is just really weird. There are a lot of unusual angles and shots with dodgy perspectives and while normally experimentation is something I look for in a good A Christmas Carol Scrooge/urchin dialogue scene adaptation, here it's just jarring. The graphic continuity between shots is all over the place, which is weird because the individual shots are really fluidly animated, almost like they're on a slightly higher frame rate, or perhaps they were rotoscoped.
The biggest crime of this version though is that Scrooge doesn't buy the turkey using the urchin. Once again, this crucial scene in Dickens' original was cut down to fit a more compact run time. I just wish in future they'd cut something less important than the Scrooge/urchin dialogue. Like, I don't know, one of the ghosts maybe? Do you really need three?
| Framing | 7 out of 10. |
| Scrooge's Reaction To The Date | 8 out of 10. |
| Urchin Accent | 4 out of 10. |
| Window Height | 10 out of 10. |
| Scrooge Nightgown Quality | 5 out of 10. |
| Urchin Cap Quality | 7 out of 10. |
| Final Score | 6.8 out of 10. The overambitious animation detracts from what would otherwise be a pretty good version of the scene. |