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Certainly no story has been adapted for the screen more often than Charles Dickens’ Yuletide tale of redemption. “A Christmas Carol” has been played straight, musicalized, undergone gender-bending and modernized in every conceivable fashion. Every year a new television version seems to appear. And of course it’s been done in cartoon form many times, with characters like Scrooge McDuck and Mr. Magoo playing Ebenezer.

Now Jim Carrey takes the part in a motion-capture, digitally animated feature that represents Robert Zemeckis’ follow-up to “The Polar Express,” with the Disney imprimatur added as a title prefix. It’s his second Christmas curmudgeon, of course, since he also played the Grinch in Ron Howard’s misguided version of the Dr. Seuss book. Unfortunately, it’s really not much better.

In one respect, the picture is fairly faithful to its source. That’s the dialogue, which is lifted almost verbatim from the 1843 novella, and though Carrey’s vocal performance treats the lines respectfully, his pinched, thin tone and half-accent have little richness. (He’s better as the three ghosts: though the rumbling laughter of Christmas Present is hollow, he gives an amusingly fey twist to Christmas Past). But others have been more persuasive as the character—something that’s also true of Gary Oldman’s Bob Cratchit (and certainly his Tiny Tim, which is just a falsetto stunt), Colin Firth’s nephew Fred, Robin Wright Penn’s Fanny and Belle, Bob Hoskins’ Fezziweg and undertaker Joe, Fionnula Flanagan’s housekeeper, and the assortment of characters voiced by Cary Elwes. (All of which raises another issue: why the multiplication of roles for each actor, except for show-off purposes?)

But what really puts this “Carol” out of court is Zemeckis’ decision to use the tale not so much to express the emotional core of Dickens’ perennial, but to demonstrate what the cinematic technology he loves so much can do. The problem isn’t so glaring in the opening reel, when he contents himself with placing the characters who’ve been artificially fashioned from the actors’ digitized performances into the computer-generated settings. True, the figures themselves remain strangely porcelain, the facial movements in particular never achieving a convincing look (a common failing of the format), reducing the actors to something akin to moderately good puppets. And the backgrounds are absurdly huge and imposing. The ceilings in Scrooge’s house are up in the stratosphere, and its central straircase looks as though it reaches to the stars. The 3D process proves an iffy proposition, too. Zemeckis clearly designed scenes with it in mind (like the Marley sequence, when chains and heavy money-boxes are literally hurled at the audience); but it also reduces the brightness of the images to the point that many scenes are dark and murky.

That becomes a secondary concern, though, compared to the director’s penchant for ratcheting up the story with what in live-action format would have been special effects. There are scads of “helicopter” shots in which characters zoom through time and space, the falling snow rushing at us as they do. But those pale beside the big action scenes, especially the long sequence involving the Ghost of Christmas Future, which involves a huge undertaker’s carriage pulled by some snarling black horses that rush recklessly through the London streets in pursuit of Scrooge who, it seems, has been reduced to the size of a rodent and now sounds like Alvin the Chipmunk. What this has remotely to do with “A Christmas Carol” is beyond me; it has a lot more in common with Steven Spielberg than Charles Dickens. (It will also, if you excuse the phrase, scare the dickens out of very small children. Zemeckis hasn’t been entirely able to shed his persona as a producer of horror movies here, and some moments of this movie will be too much for the youngest kids.)

“Disney’s A Christmas Carol” is clear evidence of the limitations of the performance-capture method of animation and of the excesses it invites. As Scrooge might have said, there’s more of artifice than art in it. Happily, one can do much better. Thank heaven the 1951 film directed by Brian Desmond-Hurst is still available. Yes, it’s in black-and-white, and the effects are almost humorously homespun. But it has a peerless Scrooge in Alastair Sim. And it’s filled with the humanity and emotion of its source. By comparison what Zeckemis has wrought is a cold and calculating machine, as heartless in its own way as Scrooge before Marley’s ghost knocks at his door.