LOS ANGELES (AP) — Technology finally has caught up with Charles Dickens' imagination.

Jim Carrey and Robert Zemeckis' new take on "A Christmas Carol" brings to life the fantasy about miser Ebenezer Scrooge's holiday redemption in a way old Hollywood never could have dreamed.

Animated adaptations have captured some of Dickens' flights of fancy and fantastic imagery, while the best live-action versions have put touchingly human faces on Scrooge, cheery nephew Fred, maltreated clerk Bob Cratchit and hopeful cripple Tiny Tim.

Opening Friday, "Disney's A Christmas Carol" manages both. Zemeckis applies the performance-capture technology he used on "The Polar Express" and "Beowulf" to present Carrey and company in fine dramatic form, with computer animation richly recreating 1840s London and Scrooge's bewildering journey through his own past, present and future.

"When you read Dickens, it's an incredibly surreal story, and of course, the earlier adaptations were limited by what you could do with the tools of cinema at the time," Zemeckis said.

"The whole mission here was to truly re-envision the movie in a way no one had ever seen it before. That came about in that when I did `Beowulf,' I realized I am now working in a form where we can reintroduce audiences to these classics in a way that makes it very modern, yet they can be these very familiar and classic stories. So starting to think about that, the first thing that popped into my head was my favorite story of all time, `Christmas Carol.'"

Performance capture is a hybrid of live action and digital animation. Actors do their scenes on a bare sound stage, wearing skintight suits covered with sensors, reference points for digital cameras to record their body language and expressions in 360-degree detail.

Costumes, sets, props, visual effects and alterations to the actors' features are filled in later by computer animators.

While the technology sounds a bit soul-killing in terms of drama, actors say it's a surprisingly unfettered way to create a performance.

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