The Polar Express

Adapting Chris Van Allsburg’s picture book, Robert Zemeckis said he wanted the pastel plates to move like an oil painting that still held a human performance. The source is images more than a plot, and the middle behaves accordingly: ticket, ice and carriage roof widen atmosphere instead of advancing story. Everything was performance captured at Sony Pictures Imageworks, which eventually managed four actors at once. The eyes were the hard part. When a performer blinked, the markers on the lid tucked under the pad of fat below the brow and vanished, so the capture gave only blink timing and animators set the gaze direction by hand. The old complaint about dead eyes traces straight back to that: a pipeline artefact, not a matter of taste. Tom Hanks covered several parts: conductor, hobo, Santa, the father, the boy’s body movement. Daryl Sabara supplied the boy’s speaking voice. On 10 November 2004 it opened in over seventy IMAX houses the same day as the 35 mm prints, the first Hollywood feature converted to IMAX 3D. A good fit if you came for movement rather than faces and treat the virtual camera, diving under the train and skating the ice without obeying physics, as the real attraction. Not for anyone unable to ignore that fixed, unfocused stare for a whole journey.