It's Never Too Early to Start Toot-Tooting Your $150 Million Holiday Movie

"This is the hottest Christmas ever," Jim Carrey observed today before an appreciative group of journalists baking beneath the noonday sun on a platform at L.A.'s Union Station. To give you a sense of the weirdness afoot, just minutes before, four carolers decked in layers of Victorian winterwear had regaled us in a cheerful rendition of "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," as a light flurry of chemical-based snow-product filled the air.

The unseasonal Yuletide cheer comes courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures, who tomorrow launch one of their most audacious publicity stunts in years: the Disney's A Christmas Carol Train. Over the next six months, this rail tour will bring a traveling exhibit on Robert Zemeckis's CGI adaptation of the well-tread Dickens yarn to 40 U.S. cities. Its last stop is at New York's Grand Central Terminal, just days before the film's November 6th release.

"Trains are very romantic," Zemeckis said. "It just feels right. Trains and Christmas, you know? It's like peas and carrots. They go together. It's a perfect match."

Visitors to the free events will be handed a ticket and invited to board the six-car train -- provided and piloted by co-sponsor Amtrak -- then proceed upon a self-guided tour. It begins with background on the author and source material. Several original manuscripts from The Charles Dickens Museum in London were there, both under glass and the watchful eye of soft-spoken museum curator Dr. Florian Schweizer -- himself something straight out of a Dickens novel. Other cars cover production design, character design, motion-capture technology, and, finally, an interactive section that is basically a Carol quiz on touch-screen monitors. (HP, being the other corporate co-sponsor, donated dozens of displays, in addition to the 8000 processors required to crunch the enormous amounts of data harvested during filming.)

Upon exiting the exhibit, you're handed a pair of 3-D glasses and invited to enter an inflatable movie theater for a ten-minute preview that shows definite promise. Carrey is clearly having the time of his life, and the 3-D renderings of period London are fittingly spectacular. There's still the small 'dead eyes' matter, though, that it seems the technology has not quite yet overcome. As a result, the scene with Colin Firth's Fred Scrooge seemed cold and sterile, but a later sequence featuring Jacob Marley (one of three parts played by Gary Oldman) -- perhaps because he's dead-eyed to begin with -- came alive.

Carrey likened the filming process -- which required the actors to don mo-cap leotards that look like ping-pong-ball-covered wet suits, their faces dotted in dozens of black sensor "measles" -- to "acting on Mars. There are definitely challenges. You have no references points -- you have to create the mood in your head." Zemeckis, who has devoted the latter part of his career to the emerging technology, was not surprisingly wholly gung-ho on the process: "The thing that's great about it is that it's just the actors doing the acting. We don't have to do things out of continuity, we don't have to break things up for coverage. We just do it beginning to end. It's a beautiful process."

We asked if the two might work together again, say, on Zemeckis's teased revisiting of the Roger Rabbit universe. Both chuckled.

"He's casting it for you!" Carrey said.

"When Jim approaches a character," Zemeckis gushed, "He approaches it with every cell, every muscle, every nuance in his body. And that's why it was such a thrill to work with him in this medium."

We think we finally found the new Jessica Rabbit.

Video:

Carrey makes his big entrance, then accidentally allows a wad of chewing to fall out of his mouth and onto the ground. Luckily Disney Chairman Dick Cook's podium made a perfect gum receptacle until the star was done with his "Whoo! Whoo!" train routine.

The train sets up a mock "volume room" -- the motion capture set filled with scaffolding, clunky stand-in furniture and props, grid-covered floors, and, of course, the leotard-wearing actors, imagining as best they can they're in Dickensian London.

Stills:

Carrey plays the main character at four ages, including Scrooge: The Acne-Plagued Teen Years™.

Guess which one is Gary Oldman.

The multimedia oversensory experience.

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