Very well executed

Fantastic!

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Not being au fait with Mister Magoo before, I found the experience of watching his Christmas Carol to be a curiosity - although not a resounding success.The framing device of this being a "play within a play" seems a little redundant - especially when one considers "Mickey's Christmas Carol". In that animated short, the audience was simply expected audiences to believe in the "Dickens' reality" without the need to be reminded of the legacy of the Disney characters. When the camera pulls back in Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol to reveal the "audience", it does distance us from the source material.And the source material, for what it's worth, is surprisingly faithful to Dickens. Whole chunks of dialogue are lifted from the novella and it's here where the film starts to shine.I'm less keen on the songs which aren't nearly as toe-tapping as they need to be, especially when the addition of these is at the expense of, amongst other elements, Scrooge's nephew Fred - a fairly key part of the story.One further oddity; the ghosts appear in a different order. We get the present, the past and the yet-to-come. I can think of no logical reason to switch the present and the past and presume it may have come down to the timing of these sequences. It doesn't really effect things too negatively, but it does feel like a rather obtuse decision.There are better animated offerings of A Christmas Carol (seek out the Oscar winnings 1971 version with Alastair Sim for one) but this is a nice, gentle, introduction to the story for youngsters.

The only really reason I saw this was because of The Simpsons, in Tis the Fifteenth Season titled episode.Homer was watching this on TV, it find it funny in the Simpsons, Well should came on here cause, I didn't think it would have been a musical, I as i wasn't really in mood for one.So any musical parts, I Fast forwards those parts,I thought it would have been a lot more funny then it was it, I did really find it that funny at all. I didn't really like the whole movie at all, it did not feel like a Christmas movie at all.I can't say anything about the acting in this movie, some parts of the cartoon are really outdated now

I'm afraid my memories are biased by being age 8 when it premiered in 1962. This show was magical! To my eyes it felt like going to the theater instead of a TV production with the use of curtains and distinct acts. The cartoons were not cartoonish, but made me feel more like I was watching a grown up show. The spirits, and tiny Tim, may have been the first show that made me less egocentric. And in addition, it is a good story well told.The Scrooge character was believable as were the others. The musical numbers held my attention at age 8 and age 50. The themes were scary but not frightening. This set the bar for the holiday cartoons that followed.

"A Christmas Carol" is 100 pages long and would take 2 hours to read, however it has generated so many variations on screen and stage(and probably the Internet). Here is the first animated one, after reading the original last year(cost 25 cents)I was surprised to find out that the cartoon version took great pains to preserve much of the exact wording of the novel. There is not even a hint that it is not the mid 1800s in the cartoon. One particular scene always gets me- the ghost of Christmas past's(a young boy or girl)face turns profoundly sad when Scrooge/Magoo sings "why such a lonely beach" and it seems like the ghost understands Scrooge's sadness. When you are a kid, there is NOTHING scarier than the ghost of Christmas future, and nothing more desolate than Scrooge/Magoo on the grave singing "I'm all alone in the world" with the camera panning the cemetery. A close second in scariness is when Marley jumps out the window(as a ghost) and bellows as he merges into all the other ghosts flying around London. Music, dialog, and even the chintzy animation is just right. I must go home and play my VHS tonight!