Having refused to visit a department store Santa, having let his little sister put out Santa's milk and cookies, Hero Boy is growing alarmingly agnostic on the Santa question, and the Polar Express apparently shuttles such kids to the North Pole, where seeing is believing.Īlready on board is Hero Girl, a solemn, gentle African American who becomes the boy's friend and also befriends Lonely Boy, who lives on the wrong side of the tracks and always seems sad. The boy runs outside in his bathrobe and slippers, and the conductor advises him to get onboard.
The story: As Hero Boy lies awake in bed, there is a rumble in the street and a passenger train lumbers into view. Many of the body and voice performances are by Tom Hanks, who is the executive producer and worked with Zemeckis on ' Forrest Gump' (1994) - another film that combined levels of reality and special effects. The characters in 'The Polar Express' don't look real, but they don't look unreal, either they have a kind of simplified and underlined reality that makes them visually magnetic.
Robert Zemeckis, the same director whose ' Who Framed Roger Rabbit' (1988) juxtaposed live action with animation, this time merges them, using a process called 'performance capture,' in which human actors perform the movements which are translated into lifelike animation. The look of the film is extraordinary, a cross between live action and Van Allsburg's artwork.
