When journalists propose a story, their editors ask them: Why this? and Why now? The same demands might be made of Robert Zemeckis' choice of a new film. Why A Christmas Carol? It's not that the Charles Dickens' tale, first published in 1843, is unknown to the reading or viewing audience. Event by event, word for word -- all 28,723 of them, from "Marley was dead" to "God Bless Us, Every One" -- this might be the most familiar of all stories, including the Gospels. Aside from millions of parent-to-child readings, the Scrooge saga has been done as an opera and an operetta and in countless little-theater versions. In the '90s, Patrick Stewart memorized and declaimed the whole thing on Broadway; the audience could have recited huge chunks along with him.

The movies got to A Christmas Carol as early as 1901, and television in an experimental broadcast in 1943. Scrooge has been played by Reginald Owen (for MGM in 1938), the great Alastair Sim (in a 1951 film known alternately as Scrooge or A Christmas Carol), Albert Finney (in a 1970 musical version) and Michael Caine (with the Muppets) on the big screen, and by John Carradine, Ralph Richardson, Fredric March, George C. Scott and country star Hoyt Axton on the small. The story was worked into episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man (they called it A Bionic Christmas Carol) and Blackadder. Among the dozen or so animated adaptations are ones starring Mr. Magoo and Mickey Mouse -- with Scrooge McDuck, of course, in the lead role and Goofy (a stretch) as Marley's Ghost. In 1988 Bill Murray did a splendid update, Scrooged, and just last year David Zucker directed a right-wing burlesque, An American Carol, whose Scrooge figure bore a passing resemblance to Michael Moore.

So Zemeckis' answer to Why this? could be Why not? Everyone else has done it. But the writer-director's prime motive, in the movie his sponsors have named Disney's A Christmas Carol, was to apply his favorite toy, the animated live-action technique known as performance capture, to the Dickens chestnut. He used it for The Polar Express and Beowulf. Now he could hire Jim Carrey to play not only the man who stares at ghosts but the three visiting spirits: Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, each character given a distinct, cartoonish size and personality. Performance capture is meant to allow actors the freedom of interpretation on a bare stage; the backgrounds, whether Scrooge & Marley's accounting firm or a vast cityscape of London by night, are created later by CGI artists.