The Polar Express English Movie
Does Santa Claus really exist? You really don't have to be a believer to get swept into this film's undisguised fantasy about the disguises that keep our fate alive.
"The Polar Express" is a homage to the spirit of faith and conviction. Though the film follows the animation format the characters, especially the children, are so warm, accessible and real that we tend to forget they are not real.
In that sense the film itself provides us with the same experience as the little hero who comes to believe at the end that faith lies in the truth that we feel rather than the truth per se.
Based on Chris van Allsburg's children's novel, "The Polar Express" is designed as a quasi-mystical journey both for the young and the young at heart. The central message is never overstated...and yet it isn't rendered at too subtle a scale.
The little hero's train journey into the North Pole is packed with interludes of high adventure, including large chunks on the roof of the speeding train, which could've easily toppled the narrative over the edge.
But no. There's a sense and sensibility underlining the vibrant velocity. The bond that grows among our solemn, sensitive, thinking hero (speaking in the utterly credible voice of Daryl Sabara) and the children that he accompanies on the train to the North Pole, specially an African American girl and a poor little lonely child, has to be seen and heard to be believed.
We have to see the three of them singing together to know what levels of poignancy are being achieved in the animation feature genre in Hollywood. In fact one of the many pleasures of watching this assuaging journey into fantasy is to see how real the characters look. The expressions that the little hero and his friends wear are so apt and lucid you wonder if technology has actually overtaken human feelings in cinema!
There is an overpowering feeling of virtual reality controlling this excursive extravaganza. While the animation generated cast members win you over with their self-deprecating charm, the film also pulls out all stops to stage action sequences and song-and-dance items that put "Mission Impossible" and "Moulin Rouge" to blushing shame.
What survives the breathless mould of escapist entertainment is the humanism of the tale. Under all the sound, spectacle and chuckles, "The Polar Express" tells us it's okay to believe in a dream, to cling to your faith. The director had earlier taken us "Back To The Future" in his trilogy of fantasies by that name. In "The Polar Express", he takes us on a journey that's at once audacious and naïve.
You really can't resist the charms of the precocious children whose expressions of keen wonderment redefine the sense of adventure that movies were always supposed to convey.
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