Robert Zemeckis spent a reported $165–170 million making The Polar Express, a record for an animated feature at the time. The film opened on November 10, 2004, and took in $286 million before re-releases pushed its worldwide gross to $329 million. It also premiered at the Chicago International Film Festival on October 13, 2004, a month ahead of its Warner Bros. wide release. So the money was there, the technology was there, and Tom Hanks was there — five times over, in fact.
What the film does with all that is the question, and the answer is a strange, beautiful, frequently unnerving one. The Polar Express is a Christmas movie built on a technical gamble that has aged into something closer to a curiosity than a classic. It earns its 6.7. Not because it fails at what it attempts, but because what it attempts — photoreal motion-capture humans, rendered entirely in computer animation — never quite settles into a style the eye can relax into.
Trailer, via Warner Bros. Rewind.
A Train Outside the House in Grand Rapids
The story, drawn from Chris Van Allsburg’s 1985 children’s book, is simple on its surface. On Christmas Eve in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a boy who is beginning to doubt Santa Claus hears the Polar Express stop outside his house. The Conductor invites him aboard. He makes friends with a spirited girl and a know-it-all boy in the passenger car, and the train rolls north toward the North Pole.
The film’s tagline promises “A journey like you’ve never imagined.” That is a fair description of the visuals and a generous one for the script. Zemeckis co-wrote the screenplay with William Broyles Jr., and the two of them stretch a picture book’s thin spine across 100 minutes. The padding shows. There is hot chocolate. There is a lost ticket. There is a ghostly Hobo who helps the boy travel across the roof of the moving train.
Six Characters, One Tom Hanks
Hanks takes on Hero Boy as an adult, the Father, the Conductor, the Hobo, Scrooge, and Santa Claus. It is a stunt, and it is also the film’s clearest argument for itself. The motion-capture technology lets one performer wear six faces in a single movie, and Hanks does the work without mugging. His Conductor is the best of them — clipped, patient, a little amused by the children he is hauling through the dark.
The rest of the cast is a mix of live-action capture and voice work. Daryl Sabara voices Hero Boy. Nona Gaye voices Hero Girl. Josh Hutcherson did the motion capture for Hero Boy. Tinashe did the motion capture for Hero Girl. Jimmy Bennett voices the lonely boy Billy, and Peter Scolari plays Billy in the motion-capture work. Eddie Deezen voices the Know-It-All, and Michael Jeter, in one of his last roles, plays Smokey and Steamer.
The split between capture and voice is not a trivia footnote. It is the reason the characters look the way they do.
Down a Steep Hill and Onto a Frozen Lake
The film’s best sequence is not the North Pole. It is the frozen lake. After the train picks up Billy, the lonely boy the Hero Boy saves from missing departure by pulling the emergency brake, the journey turns genuinely dangerous. A throttle malfunction sends the Polar Express speeding down a steep hill and onto a frozen lake. The lost throttle pin nearly causes a disaster before the engineer regains control.
The train arrives at the North Pole on schedule.
That sentence is the hinge of the whole movie. Everything before it is motion, and everything after it is message.
What the Motion Capture Actually Does
The production sequences for the motion-capture animation ran from June 2003 to May 2004. That is nearly a year of performance capture for a 100-minute film, and the result is a set of human faces that sit somewhere in the uncanny valley and refuse to climb out. The eyes are too still. The skin has a sheen. Children in the audience in 2004 did not care, and children now will not care either. Adults will.
Here is what the film gets right, and it is worth listing plainly:
- The train itself, from the engine to the observation car, is a magnificent piece of design.
- The North Pole arrival sequence has real scale and real cold in it.
- Michael Jeter’s Smokey and Steamer give the engine room a warmth the rest of the film lacks.
- The hot chocolate number is the only scene that commits fully to being a musical, and it is better for it.
Here is what it gets wrong. The film is so committed to its own technology that it forgets to let the children be children. Hero Boy, Hero Girl, and the Know-It-All speak in the register of a screenplay, not of kids on a train at midnight.
A Ticket, a Girl, and an Observation Car
The middle act is where The Polar Express loses its footing. The girl leaves with the Conductor to deliver Billy a cup of hot chocolate. The boy notices her unstamped ticket and tries to return it. The ticket blows through the wilderness and eventually finds its way back onto the train. When the girl discovers it is missing, the Conductor escorts her out of the passenger car.
The boy fears she will be put off the train. He travels across the roof to find her, aided by the Hobo. When he reaches the engine, he finds her driving the train while the engineer and fireman repair the headlamp. Then comes the caribou. Then the frozen lake. Then the North Pole.
It is invention, and it is invention of the filler kind. The film needed a second act, so it built one out of near-misses and mechanical failures. The caribou near miss and the throttle pin are the same beat twice: something goes wrong, someone fixes it, the train keeps moving.
The First Gift of Christmas
At the North Pole, the Conductor announces that one of the children will be chosen to receive the first gift of Christmas from Santa. The boy and girl try to convince Billy to join the festivities. They accidentally unhitch the observation car from the train. It rolls along a track into Santa’s workshop, where Billy finds a present addressed to him. Then the three children are dumped into Santa’s sack, where they find the Know-It-All.
This is the film’s structural problem in one sequence. The plot keeps happening to the children rather than because of them. Billy finds a present addressed to him — but the film never earns that present. It arrives by accident, in a sack, after a runaway train car. The wonder the movie keeps insisting on is delivered by coincidence.
And yet. The Polar Express is not a failure. It is a film that bet everything on a technology that was not ready, and it lost that bet in a way that is still interesting to watch. The $165–170 million budget bought something no animated feature had bought before: a fully photoreal human world, rendered end to end. That world looks wrong now, in the way that a proof of concept looks wrong.
Critics were mixed on it at the time, and the box office was not. $286 million on release, $329 million with re-releases. That is a hit. But box office is not the same as a recommendation, and this paper is not going to pretend otherwise. The Polar Express is a Christmas movie that people watch because it is on, not because it is good. It sits in the rotation the way a decoration sits in a box — pulled out once a year, admired for what it is, put back.
As of 2024, a sequel is in development. That is the part worth watching. If a return to the North Pole arrives with two decades of motion-capture lessons behind it, the result could be the film this one wanted to be. The train was always the good idea. The faces were the problem.
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