Bob Dylan released a Christmas album a couple weeks ago. Which is weird. It’s called Christmas in the Heart. Musically and conceptually, it’s nothing special, which actually makes it kind of special. Dylan simply applies his aged wheeze to a series of nostalgic holiday favorites, to variable effect—his yelped “Christmas Song” is not exactly Nat King Cole—but with consistent warmth and sincerity. In spite of his raspy voice and weirdo blues mannerisms, he sounds like a little kid singing his heart out, honored that a real band is playing along with him. It’s jarring; you wonder whether he’s at least half-joking. But at times, the old man’s growl and the cheesy string arrangements really glow, and you feel the presence of something troubling, something innocent. You almost want to cry, or hug someone.

Disney’s A Christmas Carol, the new whiz-bang CGI extravaganza from Robert Zemeckis, takes an aesthetic approach directly opposite to Dylan’s bare-bones holiday cheer; it presents the Dickens story as a gaudy sentimental theme park. As in his versions of The Polar Express and Beowulf, Zemeckis employs a performance-capture animation technique, which incorporates actors’ real performances into a CGI world. It looks weird. (This movie has a lot to recommend it, but there’s no getting around the fact that live action/animation hybrid-people look like fleshy holographs.) Zemeckis is very faithful to Dickens’ story, keeping its thick, portentous dialogue and spirited moralism; this is good news with some drawbacks. There are times when the digital wizardry seems bored by the more melodramatic and wordy scenes, decorating them with swooshing camera movements and digital tricks which only drain them of conviction. At its most uncertain, especially early on, the movie threatens to be a spiffy illustrated tour of the story rather than a real adaptation.

But it works! Taken as a whole, the big ol’ contraption is a success. That’s because, like the Dylan album, it approaches Christmas with wonder and awe, with an open-mouthed stare. It has a roundabout way of getting to that reverence, like going to a carnival freakshow to learn about the dignity of the human person. Zemeckis does pretty well with the grandeur and festivity of Christmas, especially in a soaring aerial view of London accompanied by a thunderous choral rendition of “O Come All Ye Faithful.” However, he sees that the heart of Dickens’ story is a man in deep need of redemption, the hopelessly depraved miser Ebenezer Scrooge. Jim Carrey portrays Scrooge at various ages, as well as all three Christmas spirits. It helps the film immeasurably to have Carrey’s twisted, elastic presence (and a wonderfully twisted visual design for old man Scrooge) at the center of the film. Because Scrooge is such a grotesque, self-distorted soul—as Scrooge revisits his past, we watch his young, healthy physicality gradually deteriorate into the familiar ugly caricature—the suspicious smoothness of his digital surroundings at least makes sense as a contrast.

Where the film succeeds most spectacularly is fear—that is, expressing the terrifying moral urgency that underlies Dickens’ love for the innocence of Christmas. Scrooge is so far from the spirit of Christmas because he is so alienated from innocence. The film is, of course, utterly unconvincing as a digital reproduction of the Real World, but it comes into its own as Scrooge is confronted with an amazing and mystical Higher Order. Scrooge tries to insist that one ghost is just a hallucination due to an unsettled stomach—“more of gravy than of the grave”—but in the enchanted Christmas hyper-reality, spirits become tangible, full-bodied, and menacing. Zemeckis’ treatment of the final, bleakest visitation, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, is his most creatively unhinged moment; it features truly startling imagery of decay, along with jolting hints of a violent Victorian underworld from which Scrooge is socially insulated. In comparison to the fervor of this dream-segment, the post-redemption conclusion, where Scrooge awakens in a state of giddy grace and commits himself to a life of charity, feels like a dream itself—beautiful and true enough, but fragile. Zemeckis gives Christmas a flavor of mortality and fearful retribution; wonder and innocence are precious and easily lost.

Nevertheless, the sentimental charm of “God bless us, everyone!” is kept safe and sound. So is the wonderfully lush, flesh-affirming spirituality of Dickens’ worldview, where Scrooge’s lust for money is manifested, ironically, in a harshly ascetic lifestyle. To conquer his all-consuming materialism, rather than renouncing material goods, Scrooge must join the abundant gift-giving party that is Christmas and enter a whole world of community celebration. In a way, this worldview is deeply conservative, with the necessary change made entirely on the personal level; Scrooge’s newfound philanthropy is presented as a “solution,” at least as far as he is individually concerned, to the horrors of poverty and oppression—the children Want and Ignorance that the Ghost of Christmas Present warns Scrooge about. But that intense appreciation for interior possibility—the conversion of a single wayward heart, innocence gloriously renewed for one lost soul in a vast darkness—is key to the irresistible loveliness of Christmas. With its pile-up of lavish effects and its plethora of star appearances (with Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Robin Wright Penn, and Bob Hoskins in small parts), this Christmas Carol can seem bombastic and overwhelming. But maybe Christmas is worth all that stuff.