Robert Zemeckis and his motion capture animation. The Polar Express and Beowulf were both dry and stiff experiments in using “actorly animation”* to tell fantastical tales of creepy hobos, jumpin’ hot chocolate guys, a kid with the most annoying voice in the known universe and naked Norsemen and the long-tailed Angelina Jolie yuck-mouths they knock boots with. While both stories had their original mystique, the animatic execution was cold and detached.

Zemeckis’ next animation project (remember when he did actual films– those were great), A Christmas Carol looks like it’s promising more of the same. But who knows. Beowulf’s benefited from interim advancements in the Zemeckis-pioneered mo-cap animation technology, which allowed it to look slightly less creepy than Polar Express. In turn, maybe A Christmas Carol, starring Jim Carrey as the three ghosts and the old codger Scrooge himself, won’t look like wax mannequins trying to hump a football.

In the mean time, the poster for A Christmas Carol has arrived (that one up there– click it to view it all close-like) and it’s everything you’d dreamed it would be, which is probably not much.

*Overrated. If I want to see an actor, I prefer seeing the actor– not their digitized, mo-capped doppelganger.