Toon Talk - From the Other Side: The Polar Express - An IMAX 3-D Experience
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(c) Warner Bros
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The Polar Express - The Awards: And the nominees were: Academy Awards:
Annie Awards:
Golden Globe Awards:
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Perhaps politics was a factor (the three Oscar slots were dominated by the Big 2 Animation Studios: DreamWorks nabbed two noms with Shrek 2 and Shark Tale, with Disney/Pixar’s The Incredibles the eventual victor), but I believe it was the Powers That Be putting the Polar team in its place - filmmakers don’t like to be told that their work is passé. Or maybe it was just that the characters looked so creepy …
And there lies the film’s biggest liability: in using the motion-capture system to animate the characters, the filmmakers have basically updated the old technique of rotoscoping (the method of directly tracing character movement from live action film references), a process that is mostly shunned by traditionalists. Quality animation should always strive to create the illusion of life; rotoscoping and motion-capture (at least as viewed in Polar Express) mostly imitates life. Or, more correctly, attempts to imitate life, as the results are never entirely successful - the seams still show, as it were (just take a look at any of Ralph Bakshi’s work).
With Polar Express, the characters often have a stiffness, an unnatural air to them - think of a film cast entirely with Disney theme park Audio Animatronics figures, with their jerky movements and all, and you’ll get a pretty good idea of what to expect. To be fair, there are moments of realism, but you’re never quite able to loose yourself in the fantasy of the story (which in itself is nothing new: a young boy is taken to the North Pole to learn - all together now - “the true meaning of Christmas�?); you are constantly aware that you are indeed watching what is in effect just one big special effect. When all is said and done, it all seems like such a redundant exercise - why employ all these actors to mime the characters’ movements just to feed all that information into a computer to virtually recreate the performances and then have the end result look just enough off to consistently draw attention to itself?