Scrooge: A Christmas Carol is a retelling of the famed Charles Dickens classic, and if you are wondering why on Earth we needed another version of this story, you're not alone. Something being ubiquitous and beloved doesn't necessarily mean it deserves, or needs, an update.
Netflix is seemingly unaware of this fact and has ploughed ahead with a charmless and soulless animated adaptation. You likely know the plot already — grumpy businessman Ebenezer Scrooge is convinced to be kind thanks to some visits from freaky ghosts — and this adaptation hews quite close to the source material, only it adds songs for seemingly no reason whatsoever.
Scrooge: A Christmas Carol's formidable voice cast — Luke Evans, Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn amongst others — shows no signs of life, flattened into a pulp by the magicless 3D animation. The songs are forgettable and bland.
It's a shame to see Netflix stray so far from what we know they can do — Klaus, one of Netflix's Christmas offerings from 2019 — still ranks supreme amongst festive flicks. But none of that originality or artistry exists in Scrooge: A Christmas Carol.
There is nothing unifying Scrooge: A Christmas Carol — its animation isn't diverse in style (like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, where each universe's Spidey gets their own style to reflect their genre), nor is it used to elucidate deeper emotional themes (like the stop-motion animation in The Silent Twins), nor does it reveal any deeper artistry on part of its animators (like Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio adaptation).
Compared to animation studios like Ardman and Studio Ghibli, even Pixar before its mastication by the Disney machine, Netflix is seeming to approach its animation with a 'throw it at the wall and see what sticks' vibe, rather than having any sort of discerning eye for what makes a good movie. Scrooge: A Christmas Carol reinforces the notion that Netflix's chief goal is to cast big names – beyond that, any substance falls by the wayside.
Animation is a style, not a genre. To see it deployed so haphazardly here makes us wonder who thought it a good idea to try at all? With so many more interesting stories to be told about this most wonderful time of the year, why take a lauded classic and churn it through this facsimile of magic, without having anything new to say or tease out from the source material?
Then there's the eternal question: for whom was this film made? Children? Probably not — it's a full hour and a 40 minutes, so probably too long for very little ones. Grown ups? Doubtful given how many versions of this story exist, and how many better ones are out there.
It feels like cannon fodder — a film made to be put on in the background while you make dinner or hang up the laundry. Surely that's the antithesis to the heart of a story like Scrooge: A Christmas Carol — one about intention and attention. You're better off watching A Muppet Christmas Carol, a truly interesting and enjoyable adaptation, if you want a dose of Scrooge this year.
Scrooge: A Christmas Carol is now available on Netflix.
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