Los Angeles - No sooner have the pumpkins of Halloween disappeared than the mighty marketing machines of the United States are turning their attention to the holiday season. Christmas lights may not yet be up on most people's houses but Disney doesn't need any prompting to appeal to the seasonal spirit. On Friday, it launches A Christmas Carol, an animated version of the classic Charles Dickens novel about the trials and tribulations of Ebenezer Scrooge.
The movie stars Jim Carrey as the notorious Grinch and the three ghosts that haunt him. But according to the Canadian comic, it is uniquely suited not only to the Christmas spirit but also to the spirit of the times. "Every construct we have built in American life is falling apart. Why? Because of personal greed and ambition," he told the Los Angeles Times. "Capitalism without regulation can't protect us against personal greed."
Another animated film that's also likely to make a splash this season is Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr Fox, a stop motion animated story based on the Roald Dahl children's book about a resourceful fox who challenges three evil farmers.
The Princess and the Frog, meanwhile, is a classical, hand-drawn Disney cartoon featuring songs by Randy Newman and set in the bayous of Louisiana.
The season of good cheer features plenty of other fuzzy feelgood films. From Planet 51, an animated comedy about life on a distant planet eerily similar to Earth of 1951, to Old Dogs, starring Robin Williams and John Travolta as two middle-aged men who find themselves babysitting 6-year-old twins, Christmas comedies run the gamut from slapstick to subtle.
Other laugh-fests include The Slammin' Salmon, about the shenanigans at a struggling seafood restaurant in Miami, and Did You Hear About The Morgans? starring Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker as a pair of miserable New Yorkers whose life changes when they are shipped out of town in a witness protection programme.
The laughs are likely to reach their crescendo on Christmas Day, which sees the release of Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, a Terry Gilliam fantasy that marked Heath Ledger's last role and also stars Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell, and the romantic comedy It's Complicated, in which Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin compete for the affections of Meryl Streep.
But despite all the fun, Hollywood also provides a decent helping of gloom and doom.
Look out for the ultimate disaster movie, 2012, which hits screens mid-November with a tale about the end of the Earth from Independence Day director Roland Emmerich.
Doom also is the theme of The Road, a putative Osc
