OVP: The Polar Express (2004)

Film: The Polar Express (2004)
Stars: Tom Hanks
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Song-"Believe")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

We are going to finish our week devoted to Best Sound with another recent film (don't worry-we still have the 2005 Sound Mixing ballot coming out this afternoon), one of several 2004 titles that I have caught over quarantine (as I finished off the OVP viewing, at least, for that annum).  The Polar Express is a weird movie, in the sense that its source material is really light (a children's picture book), and it sort of stands on the precipice between what we think of today as "modern-day" computer animation, and when the genre was still in its infancy.  At around 2004, you had groundbreaking, beautiful films like Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo out from Pixar, and Dreamworks had the very profitable (and at least technically impressive) Shrek franchise.  You also had Chicken Little coming from Disney, which is one of the ugliest animated films I've seen.  Few movies, though, invited as much derision upon their release during this time frame as The Polar Express-it's basically the benchmark for any conversation people have about the "uncanny valley."  But before we get into the animation (I have thoughts), let's get into the movie itself.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film all takes place in one night, and while it isn't short (100 minutes is about average for an animated feature), it also is really truthful to the original source, the beloved book by Chris van Allsburg.  A Hero Boy gets to go to the North Pole on Christmas Eve, along with dozens of other children, to meet Santa Claus.  Along the way he meets a cast of characters, including a Hobo (almost all of these characters for reasons I can't quite explain, are voiced by Tom Hanks) and a train Conductor, as well as a host of one-note children.  The film's climax takes place at the North Pole, when the Hero Boy, after eventually being distracted from reaching Santa, is given the first gift of Christmas, a bell from Santa's sleigh that you can only hear if you truly believe in him.  When he returns home, he finds he and his sister can hear the bell, but his parents cannot, and though as he grew older other children (including his sister) lose the ability tohear the bell, he would always hear it, and always believe.

It's pretty sweet and saccharine, but I have a solid tolerance for films that are sentimental about Christmas.  What I don't have patience for is movies that really do not know how to flesh out their story properly.  The Polar Express almost becomes a movie so bad it's good-in-a-terrible-way...almost.  The children are annoying-like, the Know-It-All character is one of the worst characters in the history of animation, he's so obnoxious.  The animation of the human figures is ugly; while the backgrounds and snowscapes kind of work, the humans look like bad computer game composites, which might be easily forgiven were it not for The Incredibles having at least somewhat realistic-looking people as part of their creations at the same time; Pixar would smartly avoid trying to have truly realistic-looking humans until roughly Brave in their films, and still allow for artistic license. Add in a script that is too heavy-handed, the bizarre overuse of Tom Hanks, and a thin plot, and you have a true disaster of a movie.

The film won three Oscar nominations, none of which are all that warranted.  The sound work is pretty bad, even for a film with a lot of great handicaps to lean into (trains, holiday-related musical cues, action set-pieces).  The children's voices are at weird cadences (some seem to speak at a strange decibel compared to others for no reason), and the editing is pretty routine-we've all heard a locomotive heading down a track before, and it doesn't have much distinction or crispness to warrant inclusion here.  The Best Original Song is super schmaltzy (remember when Josh Groban randomly dueted with Beyonce at the 2005 Oscars for this and the eventual winner sang the song during his speech because he didn't like the way it was sung earlier?), and has the fatal flaw of not being relevant to the rest of the movie-it's very much an end credits song in a movie where it would have fit like a glove as a musical touchstone throughout the picture.  All-in-all, Polar Express was a disaster that didn't deserve to be invited to the Oscars.