A beautiful picture that doesn't speak a thousand words.

Rating: 6/10 (23 December 2004)

It has taken ten years for Chris Van Allsburg's charming picture book to make it to the big screen, but it has been worth the wait. Mostly.
Robert Zemeckis has made a leap forward in animation with The Polar Express, the story of a sceptical young boy who gets on a train destined for the North Pole. Motion capture truly does capture the performances of its characters, and the human nuances that have eluded animators for so long are present here in spectacular detail. For this Zemeckis deserves an Oscar.
Now let's talk plot. The Polar Express is a tiny story that can be read in ten minutes. It is numbingly obvious that Zemeckis has tried desperately to fatten up the tale with a barrage of subplots, which eventually all arc back to what is unfortunately a very weak central plot. It is certainly not a bad plot, I'm as much of a sucker for Christmas spirit stories as any five year old, but there simply is not enough of it to constitute a hundred minutes.
The film chugs along at a slow pace, capturing a midnight mood by accident. The excitement is then delivered in gratuitous and all too common roller coaster sequences which would no doubt look so much better in 3D IMAX, the format that this film was made to be viewed in.
In terms of characters, the little boy from the book has been turned into a sceptic in order to encourage some form of tension in the film. It is a good move, as without this, there is absolutely no drama whatsoever. Tom Hanks voices the kid, as he does almost all the male characters. To have Hanks voice the child is a mistake, as although he is good at it, the idea of the boy envisioning the conductor and Santa in the template of his father is lost, not only by this, but also through the underdevelopment of the relationship between father and son.
Hero Girl (Nona Gaye) is the film's best elaboration from the original story, and her moral journey is a well developed one. The message delivered to the Lonely Boy (Peter Scolari) by the Conductor (Hanks again) on his ticket is an ambiguous one that needs further explanation if it is to be heeded by the film's younger viewers.
The Polar Express is a film that will be remembered for its original and visually superb presentation. Plot, character development and pace will of course be (and in some ways, already are) overlooked when this film is labelled a classic of our time. It is wonderful that such innocent and moral driven films are still being made, but Zemecks' latest would have been so much more perfect if it had been made as a short film. There isn't enough to work with, and subplots are forced into place to fatten up the story. A beautiful painting that doesn't speak a thousand words.
Rating: 3/5