I went to see Disney’s new A Christmas Carol on Sunday. I didn’t like it as much as Ted Baehr and Michael Medved, whose glowing reviews persuaded me to see it in the first place, did. But I did like it, and I suspect it may grow on me, and the DVD will end up on my Christmas Carol shelf, along with the Sim, Scott and Finney versions, which I watch liturgically every Yuletide.

One bit of good news is that the familiar computer animation technique, which director Robert Zemeckis seems to have infinite faith in, has improved considerably. The eye problem, especially—the way all the characters in Beowulf seemed to be blind, because they couldn’t track the objects they were observing—has been solved. Facial expressions are also much better. Still, I find the animated people—almost human-looking but not quite, and mostly with slightly enlarged heads—a little off-putting. On the plus side, Tiny Tim (with whom I’ve never been very happy ) is much less irritating than usual here, and only spends a short time onscreen.

The animation technique brings one big, solid advantage. Here, at long last, we have a Scrooge who looks like Scrooge, a Scrooge who looks like the man I imagined when I first read the story (and I’ll bet you did too, if you’ve ever read it. Which is worth the trouble). Sim, Scott and Finney, for all their excellences (and they had many) didn’t really look like Scrooge. Their noses and chins weren’t long enough, and did not incline toward one another. Jim Carrey doesn’t look like Scrooge either, but the magic of CGI changes that (he also looks like the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, as he plays all those roles. There’s a very odd scene where Christmas Past, along with Old Scrooge, is watching Young Scrooge, so you actually have a Carrey watching a Carrey watching a Carrey).

On the other hand, Scrooge may be too good. The animators make him so very thin and bent that it kept drawing my attention to the fact that I was looking at an animation and not a photographic record. Maybe it’s just unfamiliarity with the form that causes this problem, and I’ll like it better when I’m better used to it.

I watched it in 3-D, by the way, because I can never resist having objects poked in my face by famous people. Cool.

What this version of A Christmas Carol is, in actual fact, is THE EXTREME CHRISTMAS CAROL! You didn’t know there were chases in this story, did you? Well, Zemeckis gives us chases. Big chases that fly over the rooftops, and down amid the sewers, of London (it’s wonderful, by the way, to see London done up big, unrestricted by any need for carefully framed location shots). Scrooge, of course, is an old man, but he gets knocked around pretty good, which is a little troubling—but it’s all a dream.

Most of my comments are kind of negative, so what did I like? I particularly liked the laudable openness about Christianity—there’s no pussyfooting at all around the fact that they’re talking about a Christian festival. Genuine religious carols are sung without irony. In one scene of dream flight, the crosses on top of a church form a central image. And Scrooge’s “conversion” at the end, always a chief delight of any production, is second only here (in my opinion) to Alistair Sim’s wonderful “I must stand on my head!” scene.

There’s one bit of dialogue that involves some criticism of the church, but it comes directly out of the book, so I can’t really complain about that.

It’s been said by others, and I repeat it—this version is not for small children. But I think you’ll like it. I don’t think it’ll be your favorite version (though it might be), but I think you’ll have a good time.