OW Demo 1 + Review - Disney's Christmas Carol

I've finished the first demo version of my game, Orphan Wars! It's about an hour and a half long, with a complex RPG-style battle system, almost completely original artwork, and a handful of original songs (I'm working on writing more). If you want a copy, find out how to get one here.

I'd also like a post a small review of the new Christmas Carol movie with Jim Carey. Rachel and I went with Nick and his parents to see it on Friday night. The theatre was filled with young families and children. After all, this is a Disney movie! And didn't the trailers look so inviting and fun?

The movie itself was a different story. The new Christmas Carol can be compared to The Nightmare Before Christmas in many ways. Both deal with Christmas, while also having scary Halloween-like elements such as ghosts. Both have their little moments of humor and fright.

But where Nightmare succeeds, Carol fails. Nightmare is essentially light-hearted and fun. It has music and cute stylized characters. They live in their own fascinating, make-believe world. But Scrooge lives in the real world, in a real time and a real place. The people there look like real people (despite some rather eerie caricaturization). So when the ghosts appear and begin haunting Scrooge, it's hard to see them as friendly, if somewhat misunderstood, as they might be in Nightmare. Instead, they are legitimately frightening. There are a slew of very loud, sudden noises and things leaping out of the screen, which made younger kids cry and made the parents of older children lean over to ask "Are you okay? Are you sure?" When things aren't jumping out at you, everything is silent and tense, which didn't exactly fill me, a 19-year-old, with warm fuzzies. The odd balance between realism and cartoon comes off as eerie. A few of the more frightening images of the movie are when Marley's jaw becomes unhinged in a fit of fury, the Ghost of Christmas Present decays in front of your eyes, and the Ghost of Christmas Future sends Scrooge down a deep hole into an open coffin, beneath which a sinister red light glows. Even without these things, there are some longer passages of dialogue at the beginning, including a little foul language, that would either bore kids or put them to sleep.

So now you're thinking, this doesn't sound much like a kid's movie at all. And you're right, it's not. If it hadn't been Disney, and if it hadn't been rated PG, and if it hadn't been obviously marketed toward kids, this would all be fine. I will admit, it was a powerful movie and did justice to the traditional story we all know and love. But the problem comes from the fact that it's supposedly a kid's movie. Even within the movie, there are silly little moments that were obviously inserted for children and made me want to roll my eyes. Scrooge gets shrunk down to the size of a mouse at one point and of course, his voice becomes high and silly-sounding. But this is happening while he's being chased by a shadowy, skeletal figure on a chariot with red-eyed Hell horses. Some of Jim Carey's signature humor breaks through Scrooge's character, but instead of breaking the tension at too-intense moments, it seems vastly inappropriate and poorly balanced.

My overall impression was that the movie couldn't decide what it wanted to be. It was too silly for adults, but far too frightening for kids, leaving me wondering what kind of audience is going to enjoy everything about this movie. I can't think of one.