I think was seeing the trailer for Zemeckis' latest "animated" film, Beowulf, today that finally got me to break down and see this movie.

There is nothing really wrong with the story or the concept of the film... boy, who doesn't believe in Christmas, goes to visit Santa Claus... as a book with beautiful pictures that is all of 32 pages, I'm sure it worked out fine.

However, as a movie of 100 minutes, there is so much filler that it stretches what plot exists to something paper thin. I think it would've been better off as one of those half-hour holiday specials on TV.

But then, of course, we couldn't have EPIC... yes, in the absence of plot, character development and coherence, we have instead sweeping camera moves and demonstrations of CG brilliance... which isn't even all the brilliant. I lost count the number of times around during the closing minutes when the camera would go from a close up of some piece of action to a landscape size wide shot of the square around Santa's giant Christmas tree. It was as if, short of a more original idea, we'll just show yet another picture of 10 zillion CG elves standing about in the crowd.

Also, all action sequences in the film are basically rollercoaster shorts... exciting perhaps the first time, but not really on the fourth, fifth or sixth iteration.

And, as I'm sure has been previously mentioned by other reviewers... there's the creepy, glassy-eyed kids.

I'm sure this film was a lovely R&D exercise for the company, but as a piece of entertainment it is infinitely skippable.

Let me break it down.

Boy doesn't believe in Santa *gasp* So here comes a pretty train called "The Polar Express" How fancy! Then the train's hot-tempered, creepy lookin, conducter with a moustache tells the little boy a tale that they are going to the North Pole to see Santa!! Is it just me or was that a very creepy moment? Well anyway, the boy gets on to see that ther'e a bunch of kids on the train... ehhhh! All these kids getting picked up by this guy to get on a train with a bunch of old guys on it... theres the bumbling stupid engineers that should not be driving a train in the first place. A chef and a lot of waiters with thin moustaches, who have their own dance number! They flip around the kids while serving them food to a very uncatchy song. What fun. And then also there is this guy that is on the top of the train that I really don't know why he is even there. And these kids have all been joined together by these old men to have the expierience of a lifetime.....r i g h t....

This was just a dull film. I thought it barely even chipped the iceberg on what christmas is even about. Of course, Santas REAL! Seeing is beleiving...yeah...
The animation is creepy!! The mouth movement is painful to watch and just the movement all together! The characters are nothing special and a lot of the scenes in this film was just ridiculous. Especially the skiing on top of the train and the roller coaster ride train track...thing. And the musical numbers were painful!

This movie doesn't have any spirit of chrismas and lacks a lot of heart, which is what a Christmas movie is SUPPOSED to have! And Tom Hanks does so many different voices in this movie. I Especially hated it when Tom Hanks as the grown up voice of the little boy...*gag* that was just a horrible twist...

The creepiest Christmas movie I have ever seen. Don't watch this movie during Christams! In fact, don't watch this movie ever!! Its not good anytime of the year.

This is going to sound crazy, but I think this may prove to be a very important movie. Stick with me, because this gets a bit deep (I hope), and most of it doesn't really have much to do with what I thought of the film itself. For the record, I rather enjoyed it, though it got progressively cornier, and even ended up a bit quasi-religious. And the weakest part was the rather tedious North Pole ending, which seemed to last forever (the same minor fault Zemeckis made in WFRR.)

But for an obligatory Christmas film for the kids, compared with nearly every other bottle rocket, this thing is the equivalent of a Saturn V.

A little boy who doubts in Santa Claus is amazed when a huge steam locomotive pulls upside his house on new year's eve. He may or may not be dreaming, but what follows is a trip to the North Pole, filled with jaw-dropping animation and cgi (I can't agree with the previous post on this. I thought the film was visually stunning, and if you think the humans were poorly animated, go watch 'Over the Hedge' (which nevertheless is a far better movie.))

But this brings me to my point. Well, alright, my two points.

The first is this:

does this movie even belong in this database?

I'll try to explain what I mean, but I may get mentally tongue-tied.

A couple of days ago I asked the other editors whether Ray Harryhausen movies belonged on Keyframe (he was the guy who did all the stop-motion animated dinosaurs and mythological beings like The Cyclops in old fantasy and sci-fi movies.

Starlac argued that even though the films are remembered for their stop-animation these days, at the time it was the studios best attempt to look 'realistic', and that therefore it failed our 'reality rule' (I just coined that phrase, but we have one anyway.)

Basically that rule can be expressed like this: the difference between the dinosaurs in 'Jurrasic Park' and the toons in 'Roger Rabbit' are that the toons are clearly not meant to be depictions of real things, or things that could possibly exist in the real world, whereas Jurrasic Park was using CGI to do just the opposite - create realistic animals, which really did exist, and to do so in such a way that, if not for the fact that dinosaurs don't exist anymore, people would hopefully not notice that they were even animated.

So that's where we draw the line in the sand. If any type of animation is used to disguise the fact that it's animation, and instead tries to depict reality, then we leave it out.

I think you can mount a good argument that 'The Polar Express' is virtually nothing BUT animation trying look like reality. It is fantastical, but there is nothing in it which doesn't either already exist, or could be made to.

There are scenes where the human facial features are so well rendered, and the movements so authentic, that I would bet money I could show a few shots or one or two scenes to my father, and he would assume it was live photography. It isn't perfect - the texturing. Not yet, anyway. But how long before it is? And the actors are all covered in motion sensors. As Tom Hanks says on the bonus disc, with movement capture technology you can create any character, and have them played by any voice actor.

When I became aware of myself thinking this way, I kept my eye on the time counter, and at about 19.00 minutes, and again at about 50.00 minutes I saw something that I thought it might not be possible to do using live photography. Thinking back on it, I think I was wrong. It would just have been very, very difficult and expensive.

Basically there is nothing I can think of in 'Polar Express' which could not have been shot in a regular movie, so long as it had about a billion dollar budget.

So I ask again, in what way does this pass our test for animation? Never mind the fact that it's gobsmackingly amazing, and would have made the production of 'Titanic' look like 'Billy's Balloon' if they'd really filmed it. The point is, it tries it's best to look as if that's exactly what they did.

MY SECOND POINT
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errr... that was just the equivalent of a cup of coffee for anyone who made it this far.

This movie was directed by Robert Zemeckis. Who is, you might remember, the guy who directed 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit': the movie which revolutionised and revitalised the animation industry. When he steps back into the 'animation' arena again (along with Charles 'Roger Rabbit' Fleischer for good measure), is it possible that he has reinvented the motion picture entirely? Not so much that I think Polar Express is intrinsically a great movie, like Roger Rabbit was, but because of what he has shown you can do now, and pointed the way to the future.

There are scenes in 'Polar Express' which would be very hard, but maybe not mechanically impossible to shoot live. The sequence that starts with the wolves appearing at 18:30 (that few seconds blew my mind, BTW), or the sequence where the train is careering across the ice, which is breaking up behind it.

This would be incredibly difficult and expensive to shoot live - and you know what? They wouldn't even bother. They'd use cgi. Like Lucas did in the new Star Wars trilogy. Like an avalanche of movies in the past 10 years.

Now, when the cgi gets so good; so realistic that you really can't tell the difference between it and reality any more, why not just make the whole movie with cgi? And now that we've got this movement capture technology so good, isn't it only a matter of time before you really can't tell the difference between an animated human and a real one? And when that happens, do we need physical actors? Like Hanks said, you can make any character, and have any voice actor play them. And you can make them look better than George Clooney or Julia Roberts, and they'll never age. You just need someone who can do the voice, and someone prepared to put muscle sensors all over their face. In ten years it may not be this sort of technology; it may be something much easier, and completely convincing.

You probably think I've gone off the deep end here, but while I was watching 'Polar Express', I realised that one day someone is going to make a completely animated movie, and not tell anyone it's animated.

If I were an aspiring actor, I'd be making damn sure I trained in voice acting, because one day they might not need to see your face anymore.

Say what you will: this is like nothing I've ever seen, and it has numerous moments that are visually staggering, even if, to my mind, the climax gets rather tedious.

I really enjoyed seeing this movie in 3-D on the IMAX. The colors are vivid and the textures on everything are so clear. You could even see the pores on the peoples faces. In the 3-D version, the snow just comes right out at you and whenever the train stops toward the screen it seems as if you were almost underneath and it and could touch the metal. The art in this movie was very well done. The only problem with the animation was at times the characters seemed to move a little jerky or very stiffly.

It had a very nice score as well, which was quite beautiful at times. The songs, however, were kind of annoying and didn't really seem to fit where they had been placed. The one that got me the most was when they served all of the children hot chocolate. It's very quiet for a few moments, and then all of a sudden half a dozen waiters burst in and just start singing a very loud song about serving food.

The story was very weak too. It was the typical feel good Christmas story. Since it was based off of a picture book there really wasn't a whole lot to go off of in the first place, and it really shows in the movie with all the filler scenes they had to add to make the movie long enough. At times it was quite dull and seemed to drag on.

The only character that seemed to have a lot of personality was the mysterious hobo that traveled with the train, and he was really the only character I enjoyed. The other characters just seemed kind of flat to me.

Overall it's nice to see on the IMAX in 3-D, but if you can't catch it there don't bother as it would probably be rather boring.

A beautifully animated, well scripted, brilliantly executed gem of a movie, worth seeing over and over. Okay, so I lied about nearly all of those statements, but at least now Warner Brothers will have something positive they can use in their commercials when they release the DVD...

As an avid gamer, I like to think that I'm pretty good at spotting what I call "FMV* for the sake of FMV", otherwise known as, "We have computers! See what we can do with them!" As a result, I got the feeling that The Polar Express was meant to be an art movie, one of those visually stunning movies that win a lot of awards, despite the story being dreck.

The Polar Express is the story... well, was the story of a boy who is taken to the North Pole, meets Santa Claus, and receives the first gift of Christmas. His never-wavering belief in the magic of Christmas lasts even after everyone else can no longer hear the special bell he receives from Santa (as it is a magical bell that only rings for those who truly believe). The movie is the story of a boy who is taken to the North Pole because he doesn't believe in Santa anymore, and must be taught to believe. Along the way, he meets a train conductor who sings about the merits of hot chocolate, and who doubles as the White Rabbit on weekends. In fact, the movie plays out like a Christmasy version of Alice in Wonderland: the conductor constantly complaints about being late, there are numerous instances of falling down the rabbit hole (riding the rails as if they were a roller coaster, sliding down the gift chute, etc.), and the Cheshire Cat... I mean Ghost of the Train makes numerous appearances and disappearances. I wouldn't have been surprised if the movie turned nightmarish, and Santa demanded the elves' heads be removed for painting the Christmas tree ornaments red.

I could also make unflattering comparisons to The Sixth Sense (I'm not exaggerating when I say that nearly every character looked sad, like they were modeled after Haley Joel Osment's face) and Back to the Future (really, how long does it take for a magical sleigh to hit 88 miles per hour?).

Like I mentioned above, this is an art movie. With roller coasters. There's nothing like obvious filler to make you feel like the writers didn't have many ideas to work with. If I didn't know better, I would swear that the movie script was written a couple of months ago during NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo novels are notorious for their numerous filler scenes, which surround a few scenes of somewhat quality writing. This is the case for The Polar Express. The best scenes are the scenes adapted directly from the book written by Chris van Allsburg. But pointless scenes, like the abandoned toys scene, or the exploration of Santa's workshop, run rampant in what should have been the best Christmas film since It's A Wonderful Life.

I will give them this: some of the shots are beautiful. The train at the beginning of the movie, the fancy camera work at the beginning of the movie (that's the first time I've ever looked out from inside the page of a book), the flying ticket at the beginning of the movie... is it just me, or were the best parts of the movie at the beginning? The destination, unfortunately, is not worth the journey it took to get there.

The music is actually pretty well done, too, especially the songs. Yes, they turned The Polar Express into a musical, a la late-80's, early-90's Disney. The thing is, Disney actually had a story to support their songs. Heck, if Disney was able to turn stories like The Little Mermaid into wonderful animated masterpieces, then how could The Polar Express slip through Warner Brothers's fingers? (Don't say, "Because they're not Disney." I'll bite your ankles for pointing out the obvious.) These are the same people who gave us The Iron Giant, for crying out loud! But I digress. The music is well done, and the soundtrack is (probably) worth owning, as long as you skip over "Hot Chocolate".

In the end, I can't in good conscience recommend that anyone pay to see this movie, and expect to get your money's worth. They took too many liberties with the story, in my opinion. I would instead recommend that everyone wait for it to show on television, and only if there's nothing else on.

*'Full Motion Video', aka 3-D rendered cut scenes in a video game