This film means well, tries hard but misfires due to the extended length

Rating: 6/10 (27 November 2005)

For the first 10 minutes this film is a delight. The filmmakers and animators must have worked themselves into a frazzle to get this amount of detail and style into the film - the human characters look as if they were both rotoscoped AND computer animated, and all the inanimate or inorganic elements of the film - the landscapes, the houses, the trees, the Polar Express itself - are dazzling. If the movie had been a 22 minute 'short' (a la "Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown"), it would have been one of the all time classics of Christmas animation. Unfortunately, Zemeckis and company felt they needed to expand "Polar Express" into a feature length movie, and the source material can't hold up to the extended length.
Face it, one of the great strengths of the children's book this movie adapts is the brevity and economy of its literary style - supplemented by evocative fantasy visuals that augment, not replace, the poetic resonance of the carefully chosen words. But here, the writers have to add extra plot elements, characters and dialog to the basic 'text' to extend it to feature length, and they just don't have the ability to triple the content while maintaining the magic of the original source. It's as if the Hallmark Card composers tried to expand on the works of Robert Frost - they can ape the style, but they can't get the resonance or the heart. It's well meant and agreeable, but it somehow misses the point.
It's also got Eddie Deezen doing one of the voices, which is always a minus for me. Deezen is still doing voice work after 20+ years in the business, so someone must like him, but all I can say for him is that he must be dependable and reliable...because he turns in his usual sinkhole of nasal suck. Sorry Eddie, I know you need the work, and it's nothing personal, but I hate you as an actor.
Tom Hanks, on the other hand, is his usual splendid self, and it's largely due to his efforts that I can enjoy the thinned out content of the various over-extended sequences. He puts so much warmth and dry humor into the various characters he voices that it almost gets this film over...if not for him, I would rate this film much lower.
Another problem: after a while, it is apparent that the animators are running out of ideas. For instance, they use a reverse 'zoom' pull back crane shot shot - that pulls back from a crowd to show the spectacle of hundreds of figures from an eagle eye view - way too much. It was sensational when it was used for the first time in "Gone With The Wind", and it's great here the first time they use it, but after a while, you can tell they're doing it again and again because they don't know what else to do. And there are a lot of musical numbers and dance scenes (a la "Shrek") that work fine at first, but really don't add anything to the story or the atmosphere. My favorite - the "Hot Chocolate" scene - is typical; it's light hearted and kind of clever, but Disney and Pixar do this kind of thing much better, and they integrate the musical numbers into the plot better.
And I hate to say it, but sometimes the art direction slips a bit and the gloriously life-like faces of the children and the train crew alarmingly devolve into the death-masks of soulless zombies. (This happens all the time in the cut-scenes for video-games). This is the peril of making computer animation as 'realistic' as possible - if every aspect of the production is not dead on, humans will look like the walking dead. This may be inevitable when you're doing a feature length animation , even when you are budgeted for 'state of the art', but it really detracts from the charm and sentimentality the movie is trying to instill.
I only rate this as a "6", but it's a STRONG "6", and there is enough to enjoy about this movie (especially the railway travel and boarding sequences of the Express itself) that I will gladly watch it again with any 8 year olds in the TV room who insist on seeing it during Christmas vacation. And there are times when the visuals are gorgeous enough to make an adult 'BELIEVE' again, if only for a second.