Movie Review

The Polar Express

The Polar Express is the first fully animated film from director Robert Zemeckis, so it should come as no surprise that it is one of the most technically ingenious ones ever assembled. This is the first film to use the process of Motion Capture animation, where an actor?s whole performance can be used to animate a cartoon character. The process is revolutionary not just in that Zemeckis and his team were able to do it, but that it is also the most realistic looking attempt to combine humanity with animation yet.

The rest of the movie is strictly for kids and is based on The Polar Express, a richly illustrated storybook by Chris Van Allsburg (Jumanji). The hero is a young boy who has reached that awkward age when Santa Clause just seems like a big lie. Then while he is lying in bed, The Polar Express, which has a conductor who looks astonishingly like Tom Hanks, chugs to a stop right in front of his house to take him to the North Pole. The film then takes several detours before arriving at its message that believing in what you can?t see is important too. Kids will eat it up, while older people will laugh at its inadvertent promotion of insanity.

This film is quite an impressive technical achievement. Their faces still look too artificial to fool us but this is the best effort so far in making human cartoon characters look life-like. Many of the characters voiced by Tom Hanks really do look like Hanks and there is another kid character that looks like the spitting image of Haley Joel Osment. Of course I haven?t forgotten the disaster that was "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,? but I wish I could. This film is much more inclined to show more organic movements and emotional expressions, whereas "Final Fantasy" was just devoid of emotion altogether. We are able to connect with these characters, which is the biggest indication that this sort of animation can be a huge success.

The visual treat here does not stop with the characters either. The scenery here is stunningly beautiful, probably some of the best I?ve seen in many years. The snowy terrain, mountains, and forests all have a hauntingly mysterious atmosphere to them that make it a shame the whole story has to be told from the train. Robert Zemeckis is able to make up for the constriction, however, by adding in some very exciting roller-coaster type action sequences. Once at the North Pole, the imagination of Robert Zemeckis also pumps up our adrenaline, sending hero boy and his friends on a quest through Santa?s work shop in order to find the rest of the group after getting lost.

The rest of the North Pole feels pretty lame. There are a lot of lights and elves, but nothing to really grab the eye other than Santa Clause being taller and not nearly as fat as the legend goes. Here is where "The Polar Express" becomes a cheesy exercise in holiday uplift, handing out revelations, preachy speeches, and overblown holiday music. Kids will eat all this stuff up, but older people will see through the cut and dry message and wonder where exactly the message of Christmas spirit is in this film. A better film would say that there is still holiday life after Santa Clause, but like I said, this flick is for kids.

Craig's Grade: B

A	10.9%
B	41.8%
C	31.8%
D	15.3%
F	0.3%