A few words about the 2021 multi-media adaptation of "A Christmas Carol" from Frith Street Films...
I admit that I wasn't really sure what was going on at first, as the characters dance around a lot and their lips don't move although we hear them talking.
Then it dawned on me that we're seeing what the littlest girl is imagining as her grandmother reads "A Christmas Carol" to the family. This accounts for the different look of various sets and old pictures popping up here and there.
I rewatched the beginning and it all made sense! We see the kids setting up a toy theater (theatre?) and cutting out pictures including the John Leech illustrations from the first edition.
I hadn't watched those videos from yesterday's post before watching the movie, so I had to figure it out myself!
In any event, I enjoyed it quite a bit. I didn't know what to expect and I honestly wasn't expecting much, but I thought I'd at least give it a look as I have Amazon Prime anyway, but it held my attention and was well worth my time.
I quite liked the narration of Siân Phillips as the grandmother!
It kind of played like an audio dramatization with illustrations and the audio portion is a very faithful adaptation with only a few changes here and there.
The biggest addition, and a fascinating one at that, is the Cratchit children talking about Martha making hats and needing to ride a train to get home for Christmas dinner. And then we see Martha and some other girls making hats! I like it!
An intriguing aspect of the film is the various vintage (and vintage-looking) pictures that pop up to help illustrate the story.
This one really caught my eye:
Is that really how lighthouse keepers got their provisions? Yikes! I never knew! So, this was educational too!
A nit-picker (and there's some of that in me) would say that not everything we see looks like it would spring from the mind of a little Victorian girl, but I'm willing to go with the flow!
I think this film was a good kick-off to the Scrooge-watching of the season. An appetizer, if you will, before the main course of Sim and Magoo and the other perennials!
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