THE POLAR EXPRESS

When a movie sets itself up to be "an instant holiday classic," one (at least, this reviewer) approaches with a certain amount of trepidation. However, there's no arguing with THE POLAR EXPRESS. Adapted by director Robert Zemeckis and fellow screenwriter William Broyles, Jr. from the illustrated children's best-selling book by author/illustrator Chris Van Allsburg, the movie is so expertly calibrated and skillfully crafted that it does indeed have both a timeless, magical quality and the immediate gratification of thrills and suspense. It also has the advantage of looking rather different than any movie in memory, thanks to some extraordinary CGI replication of human characters.

Our nameless narrator (voiced by Tom Hanks, who plays many roles here) brings us back to a crucial Christmas Eve in his childhood, when his doubts about the existence of Santa Claus have reached a peak. He is lured from his bed by the sound of a train outside. When he goes to investigate, the boy (voiced by Daryl Sabara, with the motion capture performance supplied by Hanks) is told by the train's Conductor (Hanks supplying both voice and performance here) that this is the Polar Express, bound for the North Pole. The train turns out to be carrying children, apparently from all over the U.S. (or possibly the world, though everyone is dressed in '50s kid's nightwear and the accents are all American). Our hero is befriended by a kind, initiative-taking African-American girl (voiced/performed by Nona Gaye) and they join forces to befriend another child (voiced by Peter Scolari) who is initially too downhearted to board the Express when it stops for him.

While there is no severe danger depicted here POLAR EXPRESS takes the implications of its G rating quite seriously the film inventively comes up with sequences that are alternately exciting, suspenseful and simply gorgeous. A slippery journey across the train's roof and a segment where the train plows into an area where the tracks have disappeared beneath the ice really do have a quality of how-will-they-get-out-of-this (although we know they will). The North Pole is a bit monochromatic and uniform (some of the compositions look like something out of Leni Riefenstahl), which is vaguely unsettling in a way that may be unintended, but there is beauty even here, and Santa (Hanks again) is a figure of warmth, wisdom and dignity without being overbearing.

The CGI animation is truly remarkable, with details like human hair rendered with awesome precision. It remains to be seen if audiences will go for comedy, drama or even other types of human-centered fantasy in this format in the end, the CGI characters are just close enough to real humans to make us slightly miss the warmth and greater nuance of live actors but in this context, with the style of the CGI recalling the style of Allburg's artwork (and our knowledge that trying to do this live with real children would be financially prohibitive), it feels ultimately right.

Perhaps the best aspect of THE POLAR EXPRESS is that is does capture emotionally the sense of a life-changing dream. For that reason alone (to say nothing of its technical wizardry and its applications as the sort of movie that will be in the DVD player every December), it succeeds.