Polar Express (A- or 3.5/4 stars)
A week after ranting at how wonderful The Incredibles is, another animated movie comes out & amazes me once again. 'The Polar Express' is an amazing achievement, but I'd expect nothing less from the master Robert Zemeckis, who continually sets the standards in unique special effects & storytelling techniques. 'The Polar Express' has been a Christmas staple for many years. It is quickly becoming a Christmas Eve bedtime story equal to The Night Before Christmas. The visual style of the book is like looking at a dreamlike oil painting. This film is likely to become as popular a Christmas tradition as It's a Wonderful Life, because the magic on the screen is amazing. Everyone in the audience quickly turns into a child & everyone believes in Santa again.
Remember how realistic Gollum looked in The Lord of the Rings? Well, the method in which the characters in 'The Polar Express' are created is the next generation of what Peter Jackson used for Gollum. Tom Hanks stars as, well, virtually everyone. All the actors' small nuances, tics, & quirks are captured by sensors and put into the computer, and the characters are rendered using this computer data. The result is the most eerily beautiful animation that has ever been created. The characters are the closest to human as has ever been created but have a hint of artificiality that adds so much to the dreamlike style of the film.
Because of a young boy's loss of faith in Santa, a massive steam train picks him up in front of his house in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve. The train’s destination is the North Pole, and its purpose is to bring all non-believers to see Santa & rekindle their faith. The movie involves a perilous journey North & the adventures of the boy, a young black girl he befriends, and Billy, a young outcast who has no faith in Christmas, at all. The North Pole is created as an industrial city, and the scale of Santa’s job is so well outlined, you could almost believe this is how the assembly lines work to get all those toys ready. The action sequences (the train is sliding across a frozen lake and going down a 179 degree grade with no brakes) are truly breathtaking achievements. And as explained in The Incredibles review, the freedom that animation provides, if handled properly, can create action sequences more exciting than anything in big-budget live action movies.
Alan Silvestri scores the film beautifully. The music lends an emotion to some scenes that would be absent otherwise, & the films few musical numbers are extremely well handled. The score is extremely similar to Danny Elfmans' Edward Scissorhands score, so it makes the film that much more eerily gorgeous. I thought the fact that Tom Hanks plays the three most important characters (The Conductor, The Hobo, & Santa) would be overkill and a little creepy. Well, the whole movie has a level of creepiness because we don’t know whether or not it is a dream, and this works because the creepiness avoids cheesiness & campiness that could lend itself to animated holiday movies. However, Hanks's multiple roles work perfectly in the films 'is it a dream' idea because he also voices the boy's father. Who better to play all the significant male characters than a male with whom the boy is most comfortable. I thought it was a great idea.
Zemeckis turns everything he touches into gold. The simplicity of the plot comes from the beloved book, but it is that drawback that will hinder its chances to beat The Incredibles for an Oscar, even though 'Express' has more impressive animation. Zemeckis does only one film every 3-4 years, but the time & care that goes into these films make them special. He's not only interested in making quality films, but he is interested in redefining the way that cinema can tell stories. He did it with the Back to the Future trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with Forrest Gump, & now with 'The Polar Express'.
Remember how realistic Gollum looked in The Lord of the Rings? Well, the method in which the characters in 'The Polar Express' are created is the next generation of what Peter Jackson used for Gollum. Tom Hanks stars as, well, virtually everyone. All the actors' small nuances, tics, & quirks are captured by sensors and put into the computer, and the characters are rendered using this computer data. The result is the most eerily beautiful animation that has ever been created. The characters are the closest to human as has ever been created but have a hint of artificiality that adds so much to the dreamlike style of the film.
Because of a young boy's loss of faith in Santa, a massive steam train picks him up in front of his house in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve. The train’s destination is the North Pole, and its purpose is to bring all non-believers to see Santa & rekindle their faith. The movie involves a perilous journey North & the adventures of the boy, a young black girl he befriends, and Billy, a young outcast who has no faith in Christmas, at all. The North Pole is created as an industrial city, and the scale of Santa’s job is so well outlined, you could almost believe this is how the assembly lines work to get all those toys ready. The action sequences (the train is sliding across a frozen lake and going down a 179 degree grade with no brakes) are truly breathtaking achievements. And as explained in The Incredibles review, the freedom that animation provides, if handled properly, can create action sequences more exciting than anything in big-budget live action movies.
Alan Silvestri scores the film beautifully. The music lends an emotion to some scenes that would be absent otherwise, & the films few musical numbers are extremely well handled. The score is extremely similar to Danny Elfmans' Edward Scissorhands score, so it makes the film that much more eerily gorgeous. I thought the fact that Tom Hanks plays the three most important characters (The Conductor, The Hobo, & Santa) would be overkill and a little creepy. Well, the whole movie has a level of creepiness because we don’t know whether or not it is a dream, and this works because the creepiness avoids cheesiness & campiness that could lend itself to animated holiday movies. However, Hanks's multiple roles work perfectly in the films 'is it a dream' idea because he also voices the boy's father. Who better to play all the significant male characters than a male with whom the boy is most comfortable. I thought it was a great idea.
Zemeckis turns everything he touches into gold. The simplicity of the plot comes from the beloved book, but it is that drawback that will hinder its chances to beat The Incredibles for an Oscar, even though 'Express' has more impressive animation. Zemeckis does only one film every 3-4 years, but the time & care that goes into these films make them special. He's not only interested in making quality films, but he is interested in redefining the way that cinema can tell stories. He did it with the Back to the Future trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with Forrest Gump, & now with 'The Polar Express'.