7 / 10
Official trailer
Tom Hanks performs motion capture for six different roles including the boy, the conductor, the boy’s father, the hobo, the narrator, and Santa Claus. Daryl Sabara provides the boy’s speaking voice, and Eddie Deezen voices Know-It-All.
Robert Zemeckis and William Broyles Jr. wrote the screenplay. Warner Bros. released the film in November 2004 in standard and IMAX 3D presentations. The Polar Express was the first feature film produced entirely with performance-capture animation.
The Polar Express has a hold on me, creepy faces and all.
The train, the snow and the hot chocolate number have a warmth I find hard to resist, and I enjoy spotting Tom Hanks in half the roles. What holds it back for me is the boy’s dead-eyed stare, which pulls me out of the story whenever the camera gets close. It’s a 7 because the magic wins more often than the rendering loses.
The film’s central technological achievement and its central technological problem are the same thing. Zemeckis spent five years developing the motion-capture process that allowed Hanks to perform multiple roles at once, with each character built from Hanks’s facial and body movements. The technology produced a new level of control over animated character movement and produced what critics and audiences quickly identified as the uncanny valley problem: human characters with movement and proportions just realistic enough to register as not-quite-right.
The technical innovation and the audience-reception problem have run parallel ever since, with the film’s reputation balanced precariously between technical landmark and visual unease.
Tom Hanks’s Multiple Performances
Hanks performed all six roles through motion capture, with his physical movement and facial expression mapped onto the digitally rendered characters. The conductor and the hobo are recognizably Hanks. The boy and Santa Claus are recognizably Hanks under additional design layers. The technical accomplishment is real and shows Hanks’s range as a physical performer instead of only a vocal one.
Hanks’s commitment to the project carried the production through multiple delays and budget overruns. He’d collaborated with Zemeckis on Forrest Gump and Cast Away and accepted the multi-role assignment partly as a technical challenge and partly as a Christmas-tradition family project. His performances are uniformly strong. The animation rendering around them is the variable. The conductor is my pick of the six. Hanks’s performance comes through the rendering there with the least interference, and he’s a lot of fun to watch.
For Writers
Performance-capture technology shifts the actor’s craft toward physical embodiment instead of only vocal performance. Hanks’s commitment to physical character distinction across six roles produced six recognizably different performances even before the visual rendering applied.
The Uncanny Valley Problem
The Polar Express became the canonical example of uncanny-valley response in animated film.
The boy’s facial expressions read as oddly dead. The eye animation lacks the small involuntary movements that real human eyes carry. The skin rendering has a waxy quality that resists empathic identification. Audiences reported that the film’s protagonist registered as unsettling instead of appealing, especially in close-up shots.
I’m squarely in the camp that finds the boy unsettling. Those waxy cheeks and still eyes creep me out in close-up, and I think it’s a real shame, because the kid is supposed to be the audience’s way into the whole story.
The technology has improved considerably since 2004, partly through lessons learned from the Polar Express’s reception. Later performance-capture features including Beowulf, A Christmas Carol, and the Avatar series have addressed eye and skin rendering with the explicit aim of avoiding the Polar Express’s reception problem. The 2004 film consequently exists as both technical landmark and cautionary lesson.
For Writers
Technical innovations in animation interact with audience expectations in ways that can produce unexpected rejection. The uncanny-valley reception of Polar Express has reshaped later performance-capture rendering choices across the industry.
The Source Book Question
Van Allsburg’s 1985 source book is a brief picture book with sparse text and watercolor illustrations of considerable beauty.
The book’s emotional structure doesn’t naturally extend to a hundred-minute feature film. The screenplay required considerable invention to fill the running time: the train sequences in the snowy mountains, the hot chocolate musical number, the troubled boy hobo, the children who lose tickets, the third-act foundry sequence. Each invention represents the screenplay’s attempt to extend a brief original story.
The hot chocolate sequence is the production’s most ambitious choreographed musical number and the most successful expansion from source. The bell-ringing and silver-bell-on-Santa’s-sleigh material at the climax follows the book’s actual emotional structure. The space between the openings and the endings is the screenplay’s invented territory, and the inventions vary in quality.
The hot chocolate number is pure joy for me, and the bell at the end is lovely. The foundry sequence and most of the hobo business could go, as far as I’m concerned. They feel like padding stretched to fill the running time.
For Writers
Adapting short source books to feature length requires invented material that the screenplay must justify on its own terms. The Polar Express’s screenplay successes and failures both come from this expansion problem.
Craft Note
Zemeckis founded ImageMovers Digital partly to continue the performance-capture work begun on Polar Express. The studio produced Beowulf, A Christmas Carol, Mars Needs Moms, and the failed Yellow Submarine project before Disney closed it in 2011. Polar Express grossed over three hundred million dollars worldwide and has become an annual television-broadcast staple. The film’s IMAX 3D release was technically innovative and audience response to the format helped justify later IMAX 3D expansion across exhibition.
Is The Polar Express worth watching?
It’s a 7 from me. I can accept the look most of the time, and when I do, I get a charming Christmas adventure with an effective Alan Silvestri score and Hanks working harder than anyone else in the film. The rendering costs it the points it loses, because a movie about believing needs a hero I can believe in, and those eyes never quite let me. Give it one careful viewing before you make it a holiday habit.
