ROBERT ZEMECKIS’S technologically groundbreaking adaptation of Charles Dickens’s festive novella is a delightful early Christmas present.

Harnessing the technology he developed for The Polar Express and Beowulf, Zemeckis and his vast team drag the timeless fable kicking and screaming into the 21st century using state-of-the-art motion capture technology.

The actors’ individual performances and facial movements are digitally recorded in real time, then rendered in eye-popping computer animation. This time-consuming technique allows one actor to play multiple roles in the same scene.

Jim Carrey not only smacks his lips and snarls as curmudgeonly Ebenezer but he also brings to life the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Christmas Yet To Come.

Gary Oldman plays both overworked clerk Bob Cratchit and his sickly son Tiny Tim as well as the ghost of Joseph Marley.

In Zemeckis’s films, the cast certainly works hard for the money. Scrooge would undoubtedly approve.

This version of A Christmas Carol opens, fittingly, with a copy of the novel, which flicks open to chapter one and its famous opening lines: “Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.”