PLOT: In a hybrid film that uses motion capture and computer animation, a boy whose belief in Santa Claus is wavering takes a thrilling journey to the North Pole on a magical train.
Free your mind and the magic will follow. As unsettling as it occasionally is, The Polar Express can take you on a marvellous ride into a childlike reverie that invokes the traditional Christmas spirit.
But the magic is triggered only if you don't get hung on up on the technique that filmmaker Robert Zemeckis and producer-star Tom Hanks use to bring Chris Van Allsburg's beloved Yuletide children's book to the screen.
This is a hybrid film that employs computerized motion capture of actors to creature the humans -- plus elves and a hobo ghost -- who populate the screen. This is a variation on the innovative work Andy Serkis did to create Gollum for The Lord Of The Rings, but without the extreme exaggeration of the on-screen image. The technique is so versatile that Hanks got to play five characters: Hero Boy, the Boy's Father, the Conductor, the Hobo and Santa Claus. Most evocative are the Conductor and the Hobo.
Other key players include Nona Gaye as the empowered Hero Girl, Peter Scolari as sad, sweet Lonely Boy, veteran voice actor Eddie Deezen as the hilarious Know-It-All Boy, Charles Fleischer as Santa's Elf General and, poignantly, the late Michael Jeter as Smokey and Steamer.
These not-quite human characters are then set inside a fantastical environment that was directly inspired by author-painter Van Allsburg's illustrations for his 1985 book. The physical setting is fictional, surreal and often breathtaking because it suggests the plasticized, malleable landscapes of a fertile mind floating in a dreamstate.
None of this would be worth anything other than a brief glance -- or a Freudian psychiatry session -- if the story the film tells were not so evocative, rich, and vibrant.
The adventure that the film chronicles may seem slight, as was the 29-page book, even with the dramatic expansion of the book's storyline by writer-director Zemeckis and co-writer William Broyles Jr. But Zemeckis, like Van Allsburg, captures profound memories and mythologies when he coaxes Hero Boy to take the plunge and ride that extraordinary steam train into the heart of darkness of his own imagination. The subtle story deals with the complex frisson created when innocence inevitably gives way to maturity.
Obviously, I cannot speak for anyone else on this matter, but The Polar Express evoked my own personal childhood exhilaration about Christmas and Santa Claus and the bewildering confusion about precisely where reality and fantasy intersected and became permanently entwined in whimsy.
In the end, The Polar Express really is whimsy itself, in its most glorious, pure state. It is more refined and fragile than Zemeckis' famous Who Framed Roger Rabbit, another ground-breaking hybrid film. Like Hero Boy, whose belief system had begun to crumble under the weight of practical knowledge, the viewer needs to climb aboard and take a ride beyond cynicism and back into childhood.
And take the kids with you. They don't have the pyschological baggage that makes the trip so cumbersome for adults. That helps turn The Polar Express into a fine family outing.
(This film is rated G)
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