Disney's A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens' perennial Christmas classic - the tale of the miserly Scrooge and his ultimate redemption thanks to the intervention of three festive ghosts - is coming to the big screen this November. Again.

There have been at least six movie adaptations of A Christmas Carol already, and that's not including such versions as The Muppet Christmas Carol. So why do we need another? What's so different about this one?

Well, the director behind this latest adaptation is Robert Zemeckis, pioneer of the 'performance capture' method of movie-making. In other words, special cameras hooked up to a whole host of computers record the movements of actors wearing ridiculous spot-dotted outfits and then translate that movement onto a digital model. Animators can then do all sorts of wild and wonderful things to the actors (such as making Ray Winstone look buff) and place them in a minutely detailed digitally-created world.

Disney's A Christmas Carol stars Jim Carrey in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events mode as not only Scrooge, but the ghosts as well. Oh, and it's going to be in 3D.