Disney's A Christmas Carol: The Book of the Film
Dublin Core
Title
Subject
Description
Disney’s A Christmas Carol: The Book of the Film (2009) sees Robert Zemeckis’ 2009 animated film adaptation of the Dickensian classic, starring Jim Carrey as the despicable, motion-captured Ebenezer Scrooge, reimagined in a tie-in, illustrated novel format (Dickens and Zemeckis, 2009). A retelling of the infamous Ebenezer Scrooge’s moral awakening through his ghostly confrontations with mortality, the book boasts eight pictures pertaining to the film’s art design and showcases a reconfigured form of the beloved Christmas text. While it is difficult to accredit Zemeckis with ‘sole-authorship’, and though most available online citations for this artefact designate Charles Dickens as sole-author, this book’s salient re-working of the original text and development from Zemeckis’ screenplay does, as demonstrated via this catalogue’s clear citation, warrant a dual authorship credit for both Zemeckis and Dickens.
The design of the cover naturally warrants examination but, in turn, this might provoke one to ask semi-arduous questions as to the commercial motivations behind the artefact’s production and publishing. Firstly, the general layout almost perfectly mimics that of the DVD releases’ poster (Disney's A Christmas Carol DVD Cover, n.d., https://www.movieinsider.com/photos/21580), and yet some changes have been made that are wholly expected while there are alterations that are entirely perplexing; for instance, the title and black text assignation “Disney’s” has been repositioned at the top of the cover over a dark-blue background, making it incredibly difficult to decipher the latter in person, while the former is incredibly clear (Dickens and Zemeckis, Cover Title, 2009). Given Disney has historically been vociferous in criticizing (and prosecuting) those guilty of mishandlings of its various IP’s and their respective credits, and must be assumed to understandably desire its name printed clearly on each of its products (Jain, 2021, https://blog.ipleaders.in/popular-copyright-infringement-cases-highlighting-disney-protective-intellectual-property-rights/), this design choice seems committed (perhaps accidentally) to making the artefact distinctly isolable as a book adaptation that flits from Disney’s expected creative and corporate intervention. Though perhaps this design is also indicative of Zemeckis’ quasi-turbulent relationship with the corporation that ended their affiliation in 2010 or, conversely, is an attempt by Disney to distance themselves from Zemeckis and his adaptation which underperformed at the box office (Beck, 2010, https://www.cartoonbrew.com/cgi/disney-ends-deal-with-zemeckis-and-his-mo-cap-21553.html). Either way, the cover’s composition makes this artefact’s archiving and exhibition extremely important in how it demonstrates equivocal, graphic presentation as it might relate to a large corporation and publisher. Simultaneously, it complicates archiving the artefact via a digital platform like Omeka (and indeed within a physical setting such as The Bill Douglas Museum) as the cover’s attribution presents poorly even under a high-quality camera lens (see above).
Another (what one can only label) deceptive design choice is the line at the cover’s base that reads “With 8 pages of pictures from the hit film” (Dickens and Zemeckis, Cover endorsement, 2009). However, these alluded to ‘pictures’ appear to in fact be some form of concept art for the film rather than actual pictures taken from the final film itself (again, see above). While in many ways this makes for a more interesting read, as there is now material that expands on Zemeckis’ (and Dickens’) finalised work, the way in which the book hints at the illustrations is unusual and, once again, either careless or deliberately elusive. Superior presentation as it relates to Disney can be viewed in similar artefacts held within this collection, for instance in Disney’s: Toy Story which demonstrates the corporation’s name showcased clearly as the owner of the property, and ‘Toy Story’: A critical reading which, while not a Disney property per say, clearly delineates its production as attributable to the BFI via the concise composition of the front cover.
Interpreting the artefact holistically and why, if at all, it is of interest as an observable piece of film and literature history, one might naturally point to the ways in which this book exemplifies “Disneyfication”, “A pejorative term for the metaphorical resemblance of some cultural phenomenon to a theme park” which also has a less specific and more meaningful academic application (demonstrated by the second half of the dictionary entry):
“…The connotations typically include cultural homogenization, McDonaldization, sanitization, ‘family values’, dumbing down, and artificiality. See also hyperreality.” (Chandler and Munday, 2020)
It is in a similar vein that Richard Schickel’s analysis of the Disney corporation’s “depressing tendency to downgrade the film as film” seems fairly presentient of this artefact’s inherent (and perhaps unconscious) effect on its consumers/readers/viewers; Disney has historically been shown to consider the “elevation” of film as “an art form” dependent “on its being ever more tightly tied, through adaptation, to the literary forms” (1968, p.273). Whereas, drawing from Schickel’s allusion, perhaps the ways in which an artefact such as this can be considered artistically (and, indeed, academically) meritable is through its use of its medium (in this case a film tie-in, illustrated book and literary adaptation) as a way to elevate the original text by paying homage to it which, in this case, can be further explored through the edition’s archiving and subsequent exhibition in either a digital or physical format.
What further substantiates the claim that this artefact is more an example of a corporate product than a literary endeavour is the sense that it strains to bind the imagery with the text in a coherent way. The eight images it showcases are bracketed by pages 60 and 61 as either single or double-page spreads and are all captioned with summarisations of the events or settings depicted as opposed to in other entries in this catalogue that showcase more intrinsic yet subtle linking of text with illustrations. While a companion piece rather than a tie-in, The Making of Jurassic Park demonstrates (via its documented imagery) the ways in which storyboarding can be used to elevate writing as it especially pertains to filmic adaptations, and so this Dickensian-adapted artefact might be best archived as indicative of the complete opposite.
Perhaps the utility of such an artefact can be deciphered via the sentiments of Sónia Matos’ ‘Can Languages be Saved? Linguistic Heritage and the Moving Archive’, especially as the chapter’s sentiments might further allude to the generational proliferation of canonically acclaimed literary works such as those of Dickens. The questions we might ask when engaging with this artefact as a piece of filmic and literary memorabilia must be formed with the understanding that “if language is an emblematic example of a living and moving archive that is passed on from one generation to the next” be it through the mediums of literary fiction and, in this case, cinema, “this in turn is a form of heritage that is constantly disrupted by both temporal and spatial phenomena”; Dickensian literature being not only adapted visually but reimagined textually is an aspect of British and Western heritage that necessitates archival study so as to compensate for said temporal or spatial disruption (2016, p. 61). Expounded, one might view this artefact as not only a product, but also a means of introduction to Dickensian literature and film adaptation for a whole new generation.
References
Anonymous, (n.d.). Disney's A Christmas Carol DVD Cover. MovieInsider.com. https://www.movieinsider.com/photos/21580
Beck, J. (2010). Disney ends deal with Zemeckis and his Mo-Cap. Cartoon Brew. https://www.cartoonbrew.com/cgi/disney-ends-deal-with-zemeckis-and-his-mo-cap-21553.html
Chandler, D., & Munday, R. (2020). Disneyfication. A Dictionary of Media and Communication. (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Dickens C. & Pierpont Morgan Library. (2011). A Christmas carol : the original 1843 manuscript (1st ed.). Levenger Press.
Dickens, C., Zemeckis, R. (2009). Disney’s A Christmas Carol: The Book of the Film. Parragon.
Disney’s toy story. (1995). Ladybird Books. BDCM Entry #92094
Jain, S. (2021, July 19). Popular copyright infringement cases highlighting how Disney is protective of its intellectual property rights. IPleaders.in. https://blog.ipleaders.in/popular-copyright-infringement-cases-highlighting-disney-protective-intellectual-property-rights/
Kemper, T. (n.d.). Toy Story: A Critical Reading. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Matos, S. (2016). Can languages be saved?: Linguistic heritage and the moving archive. In Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology and the Social (pp. 61-84). Amsterdam University Press.
Schickel, R. (2019). The Disney version: The life, times, art and commerce of Walt Disney. Simon & Schuster.
Shay, D., & Duncan, J. (1993). The making of Jurassic Park.
Zemeckis, R. (2009). Disney’s A Christmas Carol. [Film]. Walt Disney Pictures.
Creator
Source
Publisher
Date
Contributor
Rights
Relation
Zemeckis, R. (2009). Disney’s A Christmas Carol. [Film]. Walt Disney Pictures.
Format
Language
Type
Identifier
BDCM ENTRY #91947
Coverage
Text Item Type Metadata
Text
Original Format
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