‘The Polar Express’ at 20: Is This Holiday Perennial Still the Uncanniest Valley?

The recent release of the latest Robert Zemeckis/Tom Hanks collaboration Here roughly coincided with the 30th anniversary of their beloved smash Forrest Gump, for which both men won Oscars. But Here came out even closer to the 20^th anniversary of another, less award-winning Hanks/Zemeckis joint: The Polar Express, an adaptation of the classic picture book by Chris Van Allsburg made using motion-capture animation. The film kicked off a whole phase of Zemeckis’s career; he followed up The Polar Express with mo-capped versions of Beowulf (2007) and A Christmas Carol (2009), and wouldn’t make another live action movie until Flight, eight years later.

Generally, this period in his career is regarded as kind of misguided sideshow – Zemeckis taking his obsession with tech-forward storytelling too far, venturing into the uncanny valley. Yet the legacy of The Polar Express is not quite as simple as a “realistic” animated characters with digital voids where their souls should be. Nothing Zemeckis has directed in the past 20 years has made more money – and given that Polar Express had several subsequent IMAX re-releases and perpetually jumps onto the streaming charts during the holiday season (it’s currently in Max’s Top 10), it seems entirely possible that it’s been more widely seen, by this point, than Cast Away or What Lies Beneath, the hit movies that preceded it. For that matter, few Tom Hanks movies since then have done as well, either. Most of them are Toy Story sequels and one is The Da Vinci Code. The movie that many Zemeckis and/or Hanks fans would place in the bottom tier of their eclectic filmographies is also, by any reasonable standard, a popular hit and a holiday perennial.

Of course, bad movies become popular all the time. (Didn’t we just mention The Da Vinci Code?) But is The Polar Express really that much of a nightmare?

For a lot of kids, the answer must be no, and it’s probably an unambiguous one, at that. It’s hard to make any argument that children at large are amazingly attuned to animation quality, whether that’s in terms of detail, budget, style, or resemblance to zombified doll-children. Those things may more subtly influence a child’s connection to an animated movie, but computer animation has practically forced kids to deal with these things, even on bona fide classics. The Incredibles opened around the same time as The Polar Express (the latter came in second on its opening weekend because of the former), and while its aesthetic is infinitely preferable, the finer points of its retro-futuristic character designs haven’t aged as finely as, say, Wall-E, made just four years later. So it’s fair to say that adult critics are more likely to get bent out of shape over the look of The Polar Express than its real target audience.

It’s also fair to say that the ample non-human aspects of the movie’s animation are well-matched to Van Allsburg’s original illustrations, which the movie brings to life with painterly texture. In fact, the whole movie (despite being roughly 12 times longer than it takes to read the book aloud) stays true to the picture-book framework; there isn’t a larger master plot imposed on the story of a kid boarding a magical train to the North Pole, just some additional characters and side misadventures.

Those misadventures are often, admittedly, scaled for an IMAX-level spectacle that the gorgeous hush of the book’s paintings don’t exactly evoke – which also helps to explain why the movie was so popular in its day, back when IMAX movies were rarely feature-length narratives. Despite the sheer number of rollercoaster-style shots, it’s not just a tech demo, in that Zemeckis seems to sincerely love this stuff. The movie doesn’t demand a sequence where one child’s train ticket is blown out of a window, and the virtual camera follows it on a winding, improbably journey through the sky, across snowy woods, into the beak of a bird, and eventually back into the train car. But that sequence, and future experiments in continuous (fake) camera movements and shifts in scale from Beowulf and A Christmas Carol, are clearly part of what attracted Zemeckis to this medium, despite his insistence that he thinks about the story first. Polar Express is barely a story; that’s part of what makes it an interesting experiment. It also allows Tom Hanks to “play” multiple roles, pre-visioning what he’d do in Cloud Atlas almost a decade later (around the same time Zemeckis would set aside his mo-cap rigs). He’s most recognizable as the train conductor generated in his image, but he also plays the kid (whose voice is dubbed over by Spy Kid Daryl Sabara), a hobo, and Santa Claus, among others.

Realistically, though, is Hanks especially detectable in those various parts, especially those where his voice or imitation of his face aren’t present? Moreover: Is there an appreciable positive difference between any of these characters being motion-captured and not simply animated? It’s hard to say. Plenty of folks, including myself, have described these characters’ limitations as a deadness in their eyes betraying their lack of realness. While that’s probably true to an extent, the real uncanniness has just as much to do with how those eyes interact with the rest of the face. (In some of the close-ups, the eyes look quite good, actually.) The eyes may be the window to the soul, but the entire human face is a valuable acting tool that motion-capture just doesn’t, well, capture. These characters are more akin to animatronics at Disney World: Impressive in a way, but clearly not human.

That fits in with the general vibe that The Polar Express is a theme park before it’s a fully living, breathing film – something Zemeckis would struggle with in his subsequent motion-capture efforts, though yielding better overall results than this one. Beowulf is a gnarly experiment in adult-oriented (or at least teenager-oriented) animation, while his Christmas Carol makes more expressive, caricatured use of the already-rubberfaced Jim Carrey in the area of bending and twisting an actor’s physicality through animation. All of these projects, in their weird way, pre-vision plenty of current Hollywood obsessions, especially computerized de-aging, which Zemeckis uses in Here, to predictably mixed effect. In some ways, watching a de-aged actor is even more uncanny than taking another look at these mo-cap zombies, because your brain knows, especially by now, that motion-capture animation is an imperfect, distorted representation of reality, while de-aging aims for a photorealistic recreation of something you’ve seen before (Tom Hanks as a young man) and can’t quite bring back the same way. Today, the off-puttingly uncanny qualities of Polar Express almost seem quaint, as does the idea that it was, at the time, the worst Zemeckis film. (He and Hanks have since made a whole terrible Pinocchio movie since then.) It’s not that The Polar Express has aged particularly well; it’s more that, with 20 additional years of weird future-of-movies detours and distortions, even the most cutting-edge affronts to humanity can age into gentle curiosities.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.