Polar Express and The Incredibles
By Orson Scott Card
Robert Zemeckis has an amazing record of creating wonderful, moving films. What Stephen Spielberg is given credit for, Zemeckis actually achieves: creating movies that entertain us while tapping into deep truth.
Of course, Zemeckis doesn’t succeed every time. Castaway, Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Romancing the Stone, and Back to the Future must be weighed in the balance with Death Becomes Her and the Back to the Future sequels.
I’m happy to tell you that Polar Express goes on the “wonderful” side of the ledger. Most of the great Christmas movies are rooted in darkness as a way of teaching us the value and beauty of our lives. It’s A Wonderful Life and One Magic Christmas and even Miracle on 34th Street take us through sorrow, loss, and unbelief in order to rediscover faith, hope, and charity.
Chris Van Allsburg’s evocative picture book, in 29 pages, created the foundation on which Zemeckis and co-writer William Broyles, Jr. (Castaway, Apollo 13) have created a marvelous magical world. The hero of the book is a boy on the cusp of disbelief in some of the dreams of Christmas. He is woken by a train that comes down his street to take him and other children to the North Pole to meet Santa Claus.
By the time he returns, he – and we – have had a marvelous adventure. The film doesn’t stint on animated thrills. The train becomes a rollercoaster; it skids across a frozen lake just ahead of the breakup of the ice; the boy and two of his friends balance their way across a rail-thin bridge … and other wonders.
But the sheer fun of it is only part of the magic here. Van Allsburg’s artwork has always had a quality of detailed dreaminess, and that visual quality is extended into the movie. You never forget that the film is animated, but because of the process used to create the faces, they are expressive. They act.
So it’s fortunate that Zemeckis teamed with Tom Hanks – suggesting at one point that because fo the process they were using, Hanks could play every role.
That would have been a bad idea; but the roles they do have Hanks play were well chosen and he performs as we would expect from our most beloved actor. He plays not only the hero boy and the conductor, but also the Hobo, Santa Claus, and Scrooge.
Nona Gaye (the Matrix sequels) charms us as the girl who takes the initiative and leads them through their adventures; and Peter Scolari, Hanks’s old partner from Bosom Buddies days, gives a heartbreakingly understated performance as the lonely boy.
The very fact that Hanks and Zemeckis reached out to Scolari for this part speaks well of the love and loyalty within the community that made this film. Scolari’s career was built around madcap boyish charm, but he’s older now, and parts for him have been few and far between. I hope that even though it’s not his face we see on the screen, Hollywood will realize that Scolari can, in fact, act – not just amuse us. I want to see the actor who played the lonely boy emerge as a mature man in good movies in the future.
The animated look takes a bit of getting used to at first. Unlike the Pixar look, this one is so close to reality that it is faintly disturbing. But we soon get used to it and like it. Not only that, but the animators very nearly solved the problem of walking – probably the weakest aspect of even the best animation systems today.
And be warned that very young children might not like this movie. The rollercoaster stuff is pretty scary, and because the animation feels so real, there might be nightmares in some of this stuff for a sensitive four-year-old. Also, the film is about the issue of what is and is not real in the Santa Claus tradition, and kids who didn’t have questions about it will certainly have them after seeing this film – even though it does come down on the side of belief.
But for most people – whether you have children or not – Polar Express is everything that we could ask from a Christmas movie.
The Incredibles
The Incredibles, the latest offering from Pixar, deserves the enormous opening weekend it had. Unusually long for an animated feature, it does chew up a lot of time setting up the premise. For the first half hour I was afraid that it was going to be nothing but cute satirical takes on the superhero tradition.
But the cute satire and the charm of the vocal performers (Holly Hunter’s marvelous voice sounds like buttered toast and hot chocolate in front of a roaring fire on a cold night) keep us interested while writer-director Brad Bird sets up a first-rate superhero adventure that involves the whole Incredible family.
The kids are the surprising gems of this movie. Only Rug Rats has done as well at keeping kids kidlike while involving them with perils and superpowers. All the characters have an “arc” – some kind of passage or transformation.
And the villain adds to the tradition of Stephen King’s Misery in making famous people want to pull out a gun when someone says, “I’m your number one fan.” (My favorite answer: “I actually prefer the company of fans who are content to stay at number fifty or sixty.”)
Pixar has a record of all wins, no losses, when it comes to creating animated films so good that you don’t need to have kids with you to enjoy them.
2004 Meridian Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
