Member review

I love Christmas. Lots of people do, otherwise how else would we get so many movies? Capitalism, but Christmas does play a role, but the commercialisation of Christmas is not the thing I want to talk about - but don't want to ignore anyway - I want to talk about this film. This was made during Robert Zemeikcs' motion capture era, a style of animation revolving around filming real actors (or in this case actor) then making a 3D animation with the footage. A major criticism against this film is that the characters fall into The Uncanny Vally, while this can be applicable in some scenes, I don't think it's true for all scenes. I think the problem lies in that the 3D artists had to make it realistic, but were limited by the tech so it looked sorta like a cartoon. Now this problem was lessened with Monster House (2006) another of Zemekis that was motion captured because the artist had more license to be more cartoony, and a Christmas Charol (2009) further lends evidence to my idea.

The Polar Express is a good film and personally, I feel it's underrated. It has a good story, the characters are written well enough and depending on who you ask might be a good film to put on at Christmas. And what most people don't realise, a book too. It was written by Chris Van Allsburg in 1985, but unfortunately I have not read or got it, but I hope it's good. Perhaps I'll buy it if I find it in my local bookshop.