Can You Hear It?

Day 5: THE POLAR EXPRESS

First let me start by saying I absolutely LOVE the book by Chris Van Allsburg. I read it to both of my girls every year and always choked back tears at the end struggling to get the last lines out. Because of my deep love for the sweet story, I was super hyped about the movie! As has become a tradition in our household, we try to see a movie, in the theater, on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, usually a Christmas movie. There was no question in 2004 when The Polar Express was released which movie we would be seeing that year. Now, at the risk of my oldest daughter disowning me, I will share with you that I did not like it as much as I wanted to. The book is short, but it tells a sweet story and certainly makes its point. In fact I wondered even before I saw the movie how they were going to stretch this story into a feature length film. There are characters and scenarios that are added to the plot to give us a film rather than a 30 minute TV Christmas special. At this point, you may be asking yourself why I have this film on my Christmas movie tradition list. The movie, itself, is visually stunning! It was the first film that I remember employing the animation process called live action performance capture technique. Eventhough you know you’re watching an animated film, the characters look almost like real people. Tom Hanks plays most of the male characters from the little boy who’s grown too old for such silliness as Santa Claus, to the Conductor of the train to the North Pole, the one who most resembles Hank’s physical appearance, to Santa himself. The same, sweet message is there that is in the book, it just takes a little longer to get there. If you’ve never seen it, you owe yourself the visual treat at the very least. If you’ve never read the book, you’ll love it.