[4.8/10] *The Polar Express* is based on a thirty-page children’s book. I loved that book when I was a kid, but part of what I appreciated about is that it was a straightforward dose of imagination. It’s less a story than a chance to put yourself in the shoes of the protagonist, and picture yourself on a trip to the North Pole to meet Santa Claus himself. There’s very little conflict, very little in terms of identifiable characters, with most of the space filled in with wonder and atmosphere.

That’s a good thing in a children’s book. Mood and setting and pure fun should be the order of the day. But there was reason to be concerned about the attempt to translate the book to the silver screen. Would director Robert Zemeckis add in more conflict and story beats? Would he be able to replicate that infectious spirit from the source material? Would he be able to expand a short and simple story to cinematic length?

The answer to all three of these questions is “No, not really.” The movie version of *The Polar Express* adds more perfunctory, underdeveloped characters and overblown action sequence to fill out its ninety minute run time, loses the charm of the original in a tsunami of ugly and at times even disturbing CGI designs and animation, and finds little reason this needed to be a feature-length film rather than a thirty-minute special.

In addition to the original boy from the book, Zemeckis adds in a “spirited girl”, a “know-it-all boy” and “Billy” the boy who is lonely (read: poor). It’s not the worst idea to try to broaden the cast from the book to help make the story feel more lived-in and less centered on one single character. But none of these kids, including our protagonist, has a personality. Instead, they’re each just bland archetypes or walking jokes, that makes it hard to invest in any of their journeys here.

That might work better if everything in this movie didn’t look utterly hideous. I’m loathe to critique the quality of computer-generated images from fifteen years ago. But the truth is that Zemeckis chose to spearhead a motion capture effort at photorealism in 2004 regardless of whether the technology and results were ready for primetime or not. This movie has problems beyond its aesthetics, but it’s not hard to imagine some lovely, hand-drawn animation conveying the warmth and magic of the original book absent the glowing, animated corpse look that so pervades *The Polar Express*’s jump to the silver screen.

The children in particular look legitimately creepy. The elves seem more like escapees from a local freak show than whimsical beings. And while the backgrounds and physical objects veer less into the Uncanny Valley than the human figures do, there’s still an antiseptic quality to the whole presentation that robs the film of any visual splendor to help offset its filler-stuffed runtime.

In truth, the only time the movie really works is when it’s going for a vaguely horror vibe. There are times when *The Polar Express* aims to be a little scary, whether its our protagonist running into a mysterious man who seems to live on top of the train or a train car full of discarded marionettes, and it makes me wish that Zemeckis and company had attempted to use this budding technology and its unsettling, not-quite-there approximations of the human form and visage, for something meant to chill rather than warm the heart.

But heartwarming is what *The Polar Express* is built for, however shoddily or creepily. The throughline of the story is that the young boy at the center of the narrative has lost his belief in Santa Claus, and it takes this adventure to restore his faith in the big red sprite. That sense of dwindling belief, restored by an extraordinary experience, is one of the clearest connections between the film and the book and, not coincidentally, is one of the few potent elements of the production.

The film dramatizes our protagonist’s waning belief in Santa with magazine clippings and overheard conversations. That doubt is replaced by a renewed sense of wonder in what is really the only actual story or arc in *The Polar Express*, with a sleigh bell working as a metonym for the young boy’s ability to buy in to the spirit of the season.

And in one of the few touches made possible (or at least made easier) by the shift to CGI, Tom Hanks plays the boy’s father, the train conductor, a mysterious quasi-magical train hobo, and Santa himself. That not only contributes to the *Peter Pan*-esque “It was all a dream” sense of the whole thing, but suggests a deeper, maybe even subconscious understanding that the magic of the season comes from the hard work and love of one’s parents, that we can feel even if we can’t quite resolve our conflicting feelings in that tender time between childhood and adulthood.

The problem is that *The Polar Express* loses that thread in a wash of action-y nonsense. Left with a bare bones children’s story and ninety minutes of airtime to fill, Zemeckis doesn't choose to flesh our his characters or deepen the narrative stakes. Instead, we get a strange rube goldberg sequence of a flyaway ticket, a pair of forgettable Disney knockoff tunes, a runaway train escapade, and a *Star Wars* prequel-esque jaunt through Santa’s factory.

It’s in these moments that the film feels more like a tech demonstration. These outings have little or nothing to do with the characters or the story or even the general tone of the piece. They’re just a chance for Zemeckis and his team of designers and animators to show off. That might work better on a sheer spectacle level if this approach to animation hadn’t aged so quickly and so poorly. But what’s left a decade and a half later is a film that feels like it’s more enamored with its own rapidly-decaying special effects than in realizing the heart at the center of the thing it’s adapting.

Sometimes, working from a lightly-sketched bit of source material can be a godsend. It gives you space to explore and expand rather than having to be beholden to what you’re extrapolating from. But *The Polar Express* squanders that opportunity, replacing the warmth and light of the original book with dead eyes and hollow spectacle. It doesn't give kids a reason to believe in magic; it only gives them reason to want to watch a better realization of the spirit of the season, and maybe be afraid that freaky revivified Xmas mannequins will come to get them if they don’t believe hard enough. Get ‘em however you can, I guess.

A young man is all excited as he heads to bed on Christmas eve. His sleep is disturbed though, when his house starts to shake. He bounds to the window whereupon he sees the arrival of a great train, one he quickly discovers is heading on to the North Pole. Safely aboard he encounters other children and adventure beckons as they learn that one child will get to meet Santa Claus himself before he embarks on his global deliveries! I didn't love this film. I found the rather sharp, linear, facial animations a bit too sterile and there is way too much chatter with not enough going on. I can play chase the ticket once, but after a while that became little better than a clunky conduit for the rather episodic nature of the narrative. I'm sure that technically it is a masterpiece of CGI and human interaction, but somehow it all just left me feeling that the cheesy sentiment overwhelmed it with it's messages of teamwork and the Christmas spirit well and truly over-egged. Alan Silvestri has provided a nice score, and when the animation scenes focus on the actual train then it does liven up a bit, but sorry - for the most part I wasn't sold.

***Some kids with creepy dead eyes take a dreamlike trip to the North Pole on The Polar Express***

A boy from Grand Rapids, Michigan, is at the age where he no longer believes in Christmas, as far as Santa, his elves and flying reindeer go, but a magical train appears in front of his home on Christmas Eve and whisks him away on an adventurous trip to the North Pole with several other kids.

“The Polar Express” (2004) was based on the 1985 Christmas book and was the first mainline movie to use motion capture animation for all its characters beginning to end (think Gollum from “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy). Some people think the animation is weak, but I think it creates its own world and has its own charm. It holds up as long as you can adapt to those creepy dead eyes of the characters.

Some people love this movie while others think it’s weird, like a Twilight Zone Christmas flick. Roger Ebert, for instance, loved it and gave it a perfect grade. I’m sorta in the middle. I see its good points and appreciate them, like the haunting winter ambiance, parts of the trip to the North Pole (e.g. the quasi-rollercoaster ride) and the kids’ investigation of the Christmas factory. But there are some meh parts and dubious sections like the whole last act with the multitude of elves and the towering Santa who looked like he was modeled after 6’5” Christopher Lee with a pillow strapped to his mid-section.

The movie’s interesting in some ways but also quaint in a cheesy way, as well as peculiar and lifeless.

The film runs 1 hour, 40 minutes.

GRADE: C

No matter how many times I watch this, it always brought me to tears!

I only wish that I got to see it in 3D at the cinema.

Watching The Polar Express is not an annual event for me, but I believe I have seen it three times and would not nix the idea if someone were to suggest watching it again. I feel a connection to it for an odd reason: my wife and I volunteered one Christmas season to be elves serving cocoa and dancing for an actual Polar Express narrow gauge train ride when we lived in Maine. (Though I can assure you our dancing was not as acrobatic as what you see in this movie.)

The animation feels a little odd at first, but I stop noticing it each time I watch it. The story turns the train trip to the North Pole into a real thrill ride for the children on board, especially for our hero boy, voiced by Tom Hanks. In fact, if you are a Hanks fan, settle in, because he does multiple voices here, including one that sounds remarkably like Gilbert Godfrey to me.

I try to avoid punching holes in the plots of Christmas movies. Half the point is that they will include unlikely events all leading to the miracle of Christmas ending. You want logic; pull out the old algebra textbook!