Meanwhile, Prince Naveen, a handsome visitor from a fictional country where men speak in ethnically indeterminate accents, has been cut off from his fortune. He's in town to dance, woo the ladies, and find himself a rich bride to assume his debts. But when a visit to the nefarious voodoo "shadow man" Dr. Facilier (Keith David) becomes a teachable moment and transforms him -- and, soon after, Tiana -- into frogs, these two kids from different worlds are going to have to work together to reverse the spell.

Voicing their characters with aplomb and remarkable chemistry for an animated film, "Dreamgirls'" Anika Noni Rose and Brazilian actor Bruno Campos have a light, easy rapport. As they drift through the swamps together, searching for priestess Mama Odie to help them become human again, they bicker and squabble with classic screwball timing. She's the uptight practical one who's hiding her heart; he's the irresistible rake. And you can tell, via the splendidly rich animation and the appeal of the two performers, the exact moment those darn frogs fall hopelessly in love.

Fairy-tale princesses, especially those in the Disney pantheon, have always been a product of their times. Generations ago, it was enough for them to be hardworking and docile, to accept suffering with grace and fall into deep sleeps when the plot required it. It was revolutionary when "Beauty and the Beast's" Belle came along in 1991, with her love of books and her disdain for the handsomest guy in town. Tiana takes the princess role a step further -- she's not just Disney's first African-American to wear the crown, she's the first one with a regular job. (Unless you count Mulan's gig as a warrior.) She also, like "Ratatouille's" Remy, makes the case for great food as a social leveler and the cornerstone of a good life. Tiana knows that food "brings people together" with more reliable results than even voodoo.

But the strides here aren't just for princesses. Those Charming Guys of bygone days have traditionally been even less interesting than the ladies they rescue. Campos makes his Naveen such a cocky player that he doesn't stop seducing even when he's turned green and asks for just one kiss ... "unless you beg for more." He's a spoiled rich guy who needs to grow up, and the movie is just as much about his journey as it is about Tiana's.

And what a felicitous spot to take that journey. The Crescent City, in all her early 20th-century glory, shines like a jewel here: an enchanted, lively, multicultural town full of bright blossoms and infectious songs. As they say in the movie, "Dreams come true in New Orleans." Randy Newman, who wrote the score, does a bang-up job of paying tribute to the city's rich musical heritage in a series of colorful, trippy numbers. There's a jazzy Armstrong-like song (featuring a crocodile named Louis), a gospel-tinged showstopper, a zydeco throwdown, and a boogie-woogie paean to the town sung by Dr. John.

Surely it's no accident, either, that a movie delicately addressing race makes stirring use of light and dark interplay. A G-rated girl film that will move crazy amounts of dolls and lunchboxes may not have an in-your-face political agenda, nor should it. But the glow of streetcars, the light glinting off stars and fireflies in the night sky -- the way that every element, every shade, is more beautiful in context of the other -- that is some powerful, lovely stuff. And you don't have to be 5 years old to be captivated by it.

Though motion-capture technology has improved since Zemeckis' prior attempts, "The Polar Express" and "Beowulf," the process still ranks several notches below the Country Bear Jamboree on the suspension-of-disbelief scale. Why is Zemeckis so fond of the technique? And what's up with having the same star play almost all the parts, just as Tom Hanks did in "Polar Express"? Have we learned nothing from "The Klumps"?

At least Dickens' tale, one of the most filmed in all of cinema, gets a fairly faithful translation here. The script itself isn't dumbed down or modernized -- it's faithful to the author's lilting prose and his deeply compassionate, still painfully relevant worldview. "It is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices." Nor does it shy away from the grim horror of Scrooge's adventure: There are plenty of jump-in-your-seat moments designed expressly to make your 5-year-old burst into tears. There are also moments of scary fun, when the action feels quite literally in your face. Undulating spirits melt into the shadows, jaws unhinge and flesh falls away.

But too much of the film is at once overblown and sadly emotionless, and too many of Dickens' lovely words sound hollow. Underneath all the effects, Carrey gets to try on a variety of funny voices and bellow "AAAAAAIEEEEEEE" an awful lot as he careens around with assorted versions of himself. But when Scrooge comes face to face with a grieving Bob Cratchit (Gary Oldman, who delivers his lines with subtle stoicism), reeling from the loss of his son, it's like two mannequins blinking at each other. Sure, we can see the wispy hairs on Scrooge's nose, but what does it matter when we can't relate to the anguish in his soul?

Animation doesn't have to be cold. In fact, the medium can convey a wealth of feeling and imagination that traditional live action can't. It didn't matter in the least that the characters in "Up" -- another movie about a misanthropic geriatric -- were Pixar-generated; it was still one of the wittiest, most bittersweet movies of the year. The problem is when effects take precedence over the story itself, when they become as crippling as the chains around Marley. Hey, you want lots of vertigo-inducing scenes of whipping through the London skies? Here's a movie for you. Want a more humanized take on the tale? Stick with the Muppets' version.

For what's essentially a scary story about a mean old man, "A Christmas Carol" remains a perennial source of yuletide inspiration. And why not? It's brisk, action-packed and profoundly redemptive. It's a story of generosity, with a message that all the money in the world doesn't matter if you haven't any heart. And likewise, you can make a 3-D movie in which characters are constantly reaching out of the screen -- and still touch no one. 

Actually, what's happening to Miramax isn't even as dignified as a public execution. Instead, now that its corporate overlords at Disney (owner of Miramax since 1993) have drained the company of its vital essence, it will be kept alive in shrunken, zombie-slave form. Reportedly, Miramax will be reduced to around 20 employees -- definitely not including current head Daniel Battsek -- and relocated from its longtime home in New York to the Disney lot in Burbank, Calif., where it will release something like three boutique-film titles a year.

I say again: Harvey's old company, the one that launched, catalyzed and perpetuated the indie revolution of the '80s and '90s. Three movies a year. In Burbank. That's not a studio or a distributor or even a "specialty division." It's a hobby, or an off-brand. It's like that weird brand of Pepsi they sold in the '80s that was neither regular Pepsi nor Diet Pepsi, the one that came in a sky-blue can and was flavored with lemon, and inexplicably had one calorie instead of none at all. That's Miramax.

It might seem utterly baffling, at least at first: Sure, the economy stinks, but Miramax's collapse comes less than two years after the company collected a big pile of Oscars and other awards for "No Country for Old Men" and "There Will Be Blood." Not only had Miramax fully recovered from the 2005 split with the Weinstein brothers (it seemed), but post-Weinstein head honcho Battsek was riding high, pushing forward with an aggressive list of productions and acquisitions. "When you think about how glowing it looked for Battsek just two years ago," says longtime indie guru John Pierson, who partnered with Miramax on various projects in the Weinstein era and now teaches film at the University of Texas, "it's amazing that it could all fall apart so fast." (CORRECTION: In the first published version of this post, I described Pierson as a former Miramax executive, which is not accurate.)

As Pierson also notes, Miramax almost certainly didn't fall apart that fast. While no one inside Disney is talking (at least not to me), veterans of the indie industry almost unanimously suggest that the Miramax collapse was a long time coming. As filmmaker and distribution veteran Jeff Lipsky puts it, there was always "a lack of transparency" in the relationship between Miramax and Disney, meaning that we never knew for sure whether Miramax's supposed hits were adding anything to the corporate bottom line. "Since the day Disney bought Miramax, who knows whether they were bleeding red ink left and right?" Lipsky asks. "I would speculate that this might be a case of pure financial practicality, and Disney finally needed to stop the bleeding."

Pierson observes that when we saw Joel and Ethan Coen picking up their statuettes for "No Country for Old Men," or Daniel Day-Lewis winning the best-actor prize for "There Will Be Blood," we didn't see how much money was spent on publicity and advertising before those guys reached the stage of the Kodak Theatre. "You can easily get into a situation where you're spending money hand over fist in search of that glory," he says, "and along the way you're eroding whatever profitable bottom line you might once have had." Indeed, although those two films grossed more than $110 million between them, well-placed industry sources suggest, amazingly enough, that neither one managed to turn a profit.

Magnolia Pictures president Eamonn Bowles, who worked at Miramax in the '90s, sees the company's near-total desiccation as just another chapter in a lengthy and necessary restructuring of the film marketplace. Over the course of the last two years, numerous other studio specialty divisions and small indie distributors have disappeared, including Picturehouse, Warner Independent, Paramount Vantage, THINKfilm and New Yorker Films.

"The landscape has changed a lot since last summer, when all those companies closed down," Bowles says. "The market has gotten back to a more sustainable level. Those companies whose basic M.O. was to chase the Oscar at any cost created an absolutely false marketplace." He suggests that surviving companies like Magnolia, Sony Pictures Classics, IFC and Zeitgeist, who focus on marketing quality films to niche audiences, are now in a stronger position. "Producers are the ones who may be hurt by this, because there are fewer players with fewer resources, and it's a buyer's market. But we've done very well since last summer. It's inherently a more reasonable situation."

While the Miramax of the '80s and '90s was a legendary institution whose movies and mystique will linger for years to come, no one I spoke to this week expressed much nostalgia about the current edition, which has flailed around since its 2007 Oscar run, without finding an identity or any notably successful films. "Whatever the name brand was worth, once upon a time, it doesn't mean much today," says Pierson. "I think anybody who was smart enough to know about Miramax knew that the company meant Bob and Harvey, and unless they go out of business, you can't really say that Miramax is dead." (The brothers' struggling new entity, the Weinstein Co., was buoyed somewhat this year by the success of "Inglourious Basterds.")

During the Weinstein glory days, when the company made money, won awards and produced or distributed important films by everyone from Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith to Pedro Almodóvar and Krzysztof Kieslowski, Pierson adds, "Miramax changed the world, totally and completely. The closest analogy I can draw in film history would be United Artists, from about 1960 to 1972, where you're talking about winning Oscars, about bringing European films to America, about working with important auteurs and also making films for large audiences. Does that mean people will forget about Miramax in 40 or 50 years, the way they've mostly forgotten about U.A.? I don't know. Probably."

To a fan (and creator) of challenging art-house fare like Jeff Lipsky, the Miramax story is more about extraordinary marketing than extraordinary movies. "Harvey Weinstein has proven himself to be a marketing genius," he says, "and that's what the success of Miramax, and all the dollars it generated, were built on. He could take a movie that was savaged by the critics, like 'The English Patient,' attract huge audiences to it and then win best picture. As for 'Pulp Fiction,' I'm not sure that any other company could have done what Harvey did with that film. And, listen, it's an overrated film, in my opinion. But the marketing campaign they built around it -- that wasn't overrated at all."

Some Internet commentators have pronounced the Miramax collapse to be a symbolic death knell for independent film. On one hand, that's lazy, short-term meme-think from people who know little about business and even less about art. On the other hand, they might be right, in that a certain era of independent film -- the one in which it appeared as a hip, hot but fatally nebulous commodity -- is coming to an end.

"If you're in the arts there's always going to be independent work, and an audience that wants it," says Eamonn Bowles. "It's going to be more complex, it's not easy to synopsize and it's not easy to market. We're always going to have independent film, but is it going to be independent film as played out in the pages of Us Weekly? This isn't the end of independent film, but it might be the end of the large-scale tarting-up of independent film."

Back in the long-ago days of my youth, when I walked through clouds of tear gas on the streets of Berkeley, Calif., to get my weekly comic-book fix, the Walt Disney Co. and Marvel Comics seemed to belong to impossibly different worlds. Their products were even sold in different sections of the Shattuck Avenue variety store I frequented (one that transmuted, a few years later, into a gourmet sausage-maker's shop).

"Walt Disney's Comics & Stories," with its nominally wholesome yarns -- albeit loaded with sub-rosa Freudian imagery -- about tightwad millionaire Scrooge McDuck, his ne'er-do-well nephew and his impish, apparently parentless nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie, was right there at the front counter, along with Topps baseball cards and Bazooka bubble gum. Marvel comics, with their pantheon of hypermasculine gods and heroes virtually oozing early-onset testosterone, were squirreled away in the back of the store, a more than faintly disreputable realm where shaggy-haired older kids played the Eight Ball Deluxe pinball machine ("Stop talkin' and start chalkin'!"), spat gobs of imitation-grape-flavored goo on the dirty tile floor and occasionally smoked cigarette ends in their cupped hands while the aged Middle Eastern gentleman behind the counter pointedly ignored them.

Amid all the waggish and frequently overheated Internet chatter over Disney's $4 billion acquisition of Marvel, announced on Monday, the central lesson -- how far both companies, and our culture, have come since my days as a patron at McHaffie's Variety -- has been little noticed. On one hand, we have industry observers disputing whether Disney paid a fair price, and who the deal's winners and losers may be: In The Wrap, founder and editor Sharon Waxman praises Disney chief Bob Iger for his "stealth move," quoting a rival exec who says he is "jealous beyond belief"; while Kim Masters of the Daily Beast suggests that Marvel's secretive CEO, Ike Perlmutter, made out like a bandit, sticking Iger with a roster of comic-book characters who've "gotten long in the tooth" and been drained of their commercial potential.

It's more entertaining, on the whole, to consider the fantastical fulminations of comic-into-movie buffs, including numerous imaginative Photoshop experiments. (There's a nice roundup of all such things available from SpoutBlog's Christopher Campbell.) Quite a few bloggers have humorously suggested (e.g.) that one or more Jonas Brother will soon replace Hugh Jackman and Robert Downey Jr. as Wolverine and Iron Man, or that a hypothetical (but entirely possible) Marvel-infused film made by Pixar, another Disney subsidiary, might pit the Incredibles against the Incredible Hulk. I'm fond of S.T. VanAirsdale's suggestion on Movieline that Disney start selling Mickey gloves with Wolverine claws, but you have to worry about the real-world orientation of a blogger like First Showing's Alex Billington, who is so deeply immersed in the arcana and epiphenomena of this deal that he earnestly speculates about Marvel's Ant-Man becoming a Pixar character. Hello? Ant-Man? He could become a gay porn character and no one would notice or care.

For what it's worth, I'm going to endorse two apparently contradictory views of the deal. New York Times reporters Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply nicely sum up the industry consensus by noting that the Marvel acquisition helps Disney with teen and tween boys, a market segment where the Mouse's princessy, Hannah Montana-flavored products have had little appeal of late. As a corollary to that, all the wild fanboy maundering about Disney draining the alleged edge and darkness out of Marvel's universe is laughably misplaced on various levels. First of all, what the hell are such people talking about? Anybody who feels satisfied with the rapidly diminishing returns of the "Spider-Man" and "X-Men" franchises hasn't been reading any decent comic books, still less watching decent movies, and badly needs to attend Andrew O'Hehir's Clockwork Orange-style cinematic reeducation camp.

Furthermore, at least since the Michael Eisner era, Disney has been a diversified global infotainment empire, with much less of a governing identity or ideology than many people think. Disney management didn't meddle much with Miramax during the Weinstein years and hasn't meddled much with Pixar, and after the $500 million-plus worldwide returns of "Iron Man," company honchos aren't likely to bland down the franchise in an effort to pitch it at 8-year-olds. I'm about to argue that they made a dumb decision, but they aren't dumb in that particular way.

OK, so all of that is argument No. 1. Argument No. 2 is the fact that Marvel sold itself at a premium, hey-what-recession price point, and did so at a moment when most of its prime properties and characters are licensed out to other studios for the medium or long term. (Fox, for instance, can keep making Fantastic Four and X-Men movies as long as it wants to.) While I don't doubt that Disney can mine some of Marvel's lesser-known characters with some success, the comic-into-movie marketplace is beginning to display some fatigue, and Iger basically just bought an oil well that's been pumped at least halfway dry. Marvel's stock went way up after the deal was announced, but Disney shares declined, and the financial-rating firm Standard & Poor's views the transaction as negative overall.

Lastly -- this is either Argument 2B or a schismatic third stream -- it totally doesn't matter who owns Marvel Comics. And we will all very soon forget that we ever pretended to care. The cigarette-smoking, Jimmy Page-listening veneer of preteen badness that Marvel possessed in my variety-store days is dust in the wind, along with the jarhead-Republican, get-off-my-lawn, so-called innocence that Disney once embodied. To quote Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere, my favorite Internet source for uncensored spleen-venting, "Transferring ownership of a major brand from corporate entity A to corporate entity B is a meaningless thing. All 21st-century entertainment corporations are invested in selling the same basic heroin."

Jeff's right, but I won't claim to be immune to the lure of that heroin. If the Disney-Marvel mega-Borg can bring my boyhood favorite back to the big screen -- that would be the pompous, foppish, mustachioed Marvel magician, Doctor Strange -- in a non-terrible incarnation, perhaps directed by Terry Gilliam (as suggested by Campbell of SpoutBlog)? Then, you know, screw all the nuance and skepticism. Bring on Ant-Man!

I wish I could say Miyazaki's latest, "Ponyo" -- its Japanese title is "Gake no ue no Ponyo," or "Ponyo on the Cliff," although the version being released here in the States by Disney is a dubbed, English-language one -- changed my mind. It didn't. But this story of a small girl (she's actually half-human, half-fish) and her friendship with the boy who rescues her from tragedy, loses her, and finds her again, is certainly simple and modest, as well as, at times, quite beautiful to look at. The magical little fish girl -- she's the Ponyo of the title, and she's voiced by Noah Cyrus, younger sister of Miley -- is the daughter of the wizard Fujimoto (Liam Neeson), himself a former human who lives beneath the sea. Fujimoto, angry with humans for spoiling the ocean environment, is hatching a plan in which the sea and its creatures will rise up to regain their rightful place on Earth. Fujimoto is fearful for his little daughter's safety when she's first swept out of the ocean and rescued by 5-year-old Sosuke (Frankie Jonas, of the same family that gave us the Jonas Brothers), who lives with his mother by the sea. At that point, Ponyo, like her many identical-looking sisters, is just a little tadpole squirt -- she's like a miniature baby doll in a swimmy red dress. But when Fujimoto gets her back to the ocean, he learns that all she really wants to do is get back to Sosuke, with whom she's already forged a bond. She also wants to be human -- she has, among other things, discovered a taste for ham -- but if she makes that transition, Fujimoto tells her sternly, she will lose all her magical powers.

"Ponyo" represents a more pared-down Miyazaki; the movie is rated G, and the story it tells is a relatively simple one (allowing for the usual Miyazaki squirreliness) that little kids can easily grasp. There are many scenes involving the adventures of Ponyo and Sosuke: When the coastal area in which Sosuke lives is flooded by a tsunami (caused by Ponyo's attempts to become human, which result in an imbalance in nature), Ponyo uses her magic to "grow" a toy boat to a usable size, and the two embark on a journey to find Ponyo's mom. Ponyo and Sosuke are appealing enough, with their chubby, rounded limbs and wider, even more rounded eyes.

And, as always with Miyazaki, there are plenty of good-looking images: The picture opens with a lovely wordless sequence that introduces us to a number of wild and marvelous-looking ocean creatures, accompanied by a symphonic score that's as graceful as gently waving seaweed. It's a gorgeous, hypnotic opening, rendered in softly blended blues and greens, dotted with families of translucent pearl-gray and pink jellyfish drifting through the depths. My favorite image, though, is that of a submerged coastal road that is now free of cars; instead, numerous types of fish from ancient times, recently resurrected from the depths, swim placidly along this underwater highway as if they had every right to be there. "Ponyo" hasn't changed my mind about Miyazaki. But I'm willing to accept and enjoy this little window into the dream life of fish.