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| Polar Express, The [IMAX/3D] |
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  (7/10)
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Runtime: 100 |
| Public Rating: 8.80 (134 votes) |
Director: Robert Zemeckis |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Fantasy/Children/Animation |
Year: 2004 |
| Writer(s): Robert Zemeckis & William Broyles, Jr. |
| Distributor: Warner Brothers |
| Reviewed by: Mel Valentin |
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Based on Christopher Van Allsburg’s Caldecott Medal winner of the same name, The Polar Express, a G-rated foray into a Christmas-inspired, computer-animated wonderland, is likely to be remembered as a failure of imagination and storytelling or, at least where character animation is concerned, a technological dead end. On a 70-foot IMAX screen in 3D, however, The Polar Express occasionally succeeds as a feature-length immersion ride (minus the hydraulics) punctuated by a series of elaborate, if conventional, set pieces. Set pieces (and character animation) aside, whatever wonderment and awe an audience obtains from The Polar Expresswill be derived from the 50s-era production design, the Polar Express itself, the underground factories at the North Pole, and the richly detailed, snowbound exteriors.
The Polar Express opens with the pre-adolescent Hero Boy (Tom Hanks, contributing his voice and body movements in the first of five, increasingly tiresome, on screen roles) fretting over the existence/non-existence of Santa Claus on a snowy Christmas Eve in the Midwest. Set in an idyllic, idealized era (i.e., the 1950s), Hero Boy’s room contains the toys (including a jetliner hanging from the ceiling) and books of a middle-class boy from that era. As he slips into a restful sleep, he’s awakened by the sounds of a train outside his window. Emerging from his house in his robe and slippers, he meets the Conductor (Tom Hanks, again), who invites him to the North Pole via train ride. On the train Hero Boy meets Hero Girl (Nona Gay), a strong-willed African-American girl, a Know-It-All (Eddie Deezen), and Lonely Boy (Peter Scolari). With minimal backstory or introduction to the characters, let alone proper names, Robert Zemeckis (the Back to the Future trilogy, Forest Gump, Castaway) and his co-screenwriter, William Broyles, Jr. (Unfaithful, Castaway, Apollo 13), signal their desire to universalize these characters into American archetypes. Zemeckis and Broyles, in the first of many missteps, chose to make Hero Boy a passive, reactive character, defined by his disbelief and doubt, with Hero Girl, in effect, becoming the decisive character at key points in the narrative (he doubts, she leads).
Without a compelling central character with an equally compelling dilemma, Zemeckis and his animators are forced to mark time with a series of contrived, if technically impressive, action set pieces (i.e., a golden ticket floating through the nighttime sky, and subsequent encounters at Flat Top Tunnel, Glacier Gulch, and the Ice Like) until the train (and the audience) arrives at the North Pole for the climactic encounter with the wise and wonderful Santa Claus (Tom Hanks once again, proving his vocal impersonations have their limits). Disembarking at the North Pole after a series of “adventures,” Hero Boy, Hero Girl, and Lonely Boy are given another set of complications (the only ones that feel organic to the narrative), this time finding their way through the maze of abandoned buildings, warehouses, and underground factories where the toys are assembled and packaged for delivery. All ends well, of course, but not before a death-defying walk across an elevated train track, and a conveyer belt misadventure that leads them directly to the Christmas Eve celebrations at the North Pole, complete with hundreds, if not thousands, of elves, all anticipating Santa Claus’ emergence from his home. The celebration is troubling, both for its faux energy level of raucous celebration, and Zemeckis’ unexplainable decision to portray the elves as wan, undernourished, and possibly joyless, characters. The elves, it seems, aren’t celebrating Christmas Eve as much as Santa Claus himself, and perhaps, the end of their labors, if only temporarily.
Much has been made of the “performance capture” technology used by the Robert Zemeckis and his technical crew to create the lifelike movements of the human characters in The Polar Express, but audiences will be hard pressed to see significant improvements over the character animations from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Facial movements tend toward blankness and inexpressiveness, and awkward body movements still betray a smoothness and roundedness missing from the physics of human movements. Instead, Zemeckis (and, hopefully, future animators) allowed himself to be convinced that “performance capture” was and is the new technological Holy Grail. It’s not. The closer to verisimilitude we come, the more uneasy audiences are likely to become with near-human simulacrums. Zemeckis has simply gone too far. Instead, Zemeckis and his animators should have taken their lead from Pixar Studios and their latest release, The Incredibles. There, the freedom implicit in the medium allowed the animators’ free reign to imaginatively design their characters, with an emphasis on exaggeration and caricature, and not on verisimilitude. That path will inevitably lead to critical and commercial failure.
© Mel Valentin, 17th November, 2004
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