‘The Polar Express’ Now on DVD
When The Polar Express was released theatrically in 2004, it was lauded for its animation, and the quality of that animation is retained on the DVD recently released by Warner Home Entertainment. The animation is so exceptional, there are sequences when, watching it, you may well forget it is animation and view it as a live-action feature film. Director Robert Zemeckis made use of the technique of motion capture, in which sensors are attached to the actors’ bodies and their movements are then recorded electronically as they perform the characters’ roles on an empty soundstage. The digital information is then used to create the animation, merging it into the three-dimensional CGI world.
The story, however, does not flow as smoothly as the animation, as some sequences seem to be disconnected to anything else. Based on the book of the same name by Caldecott Medal winner Chris Van Allsburg, it centers on a boy of about eight years old who is just on the cusp of the “is Santa Clause real?” stage of childhood. The film opens on Christmas Eve, with the unnamed “hero boy” lying in bed listening in hope against hope for the sound of Santa’s sleigh bells. What he hears instead — and feels, for it shakes his room like an earthquake as it rumbles to his yard — is a passenger train: the Polar Express.
As no one else in hero boy’s family — younger sister, mother, father — seems to hear the train, perhaps it and hero boy’s adventures are a dream. There are scenes and characters that come in and out of the story with no defined reason, which is an attribute of dreams. But the animation is so life-like, it works against a dream effect if such is, in fact, what’s intended.
Body movements, especially musculature around the characters’ mouths when they speak, replicates that of a human body very closely, and the characters and scenery have little of the cartoon quality usually found in animated films. This makes all the more noticeable the lack of any human warmth to the story; we can identify with the characters but we don’t feel for them.
Hero boy is invited by an indifferent conductor to board the train. He finds other children already on board, and one more joins them at the next stop. One is a lost and lonely boy, one is a know-it-all boy — perhaps aspects of hero boy’s personality? — and one is a caring and mothering girl. These four, singly or in various combinations, share adventures with the conductor, a mysterious hobo who rides atop the train and, eventually, with Santa himself.
The train takes them through such action adventures as a broken-brake run on terrifying stretches of roller-coaster track and an attempted crossing of a frozen lake of which the ice begins to crack apart and the resulting waves threaten to submerge the train. Scenery is beautifully composed, from snow-covered forest to breathtaking Northern Lights to homes and towns. Ultimately, hero boy’s quest for truth puts it back to his own mind with the message, “Sometimes the most real things in the world are the things we can’t see.”
Writes 15-year-old KIDS FIRST! reviewer Phoenix Diller, “The film, like the book, captures the Christmas magic and everything Christmas represents. My favorite part of the film is when the boy runs outside in his pajamas to the magical Polar Express at the beginning of the film. The train is so believable and the sounds are very much the sounds of a real train! It’s a very magical scene!”
Special effects bring both power and realism to the action. This, plus the premise of the story, makes the film suited more to an older child than a very young one.
