O.K. this Polar Express movie has me annoyed...

I was already starting to get annoyed at the fact that every other month hollywood seems to feel the need to release yet another computer animated movie featuring wacky famous stars doing the voices, and re-treading corny old one-liners in an attempt to appeal to adults as well as children.

But now with this Polar Express movie I just don't get it. The characters are all humans. They had the actual actors perform the parts, filmed them, and then digitized it. Why? Why? Why not just make a live action movie of the book. Why does EVERYTHING geared towards kids have to be digitally animated any more? O.K. I can understand Will Smith not actually being a fish creates issues that would require digital animation. But Tom Hanks could very easily play a conductor without digital enhancement. And last I checked hundreds of actual humans have played Santa Clause and elves in movies for the past 50 or so years.

O.K. end of rant.

Polar Express would have cost hundreds of millions to do, even though they fluffed out a pretty meager 30 some page children's book to movie length.

Into the digital environment. That's the last 3 Star Wars flicks in a nutshell (not that they're anything to aspire to.)

I don't care what the critics say, it looks like crap. And the book is overrated too.

I was going to start a thread on it but this is as good a place as any. It is much cheaper to do it with animation but the whole image gives me the willies.

Haven't seen what they all look like but a bunch of them don't look like Tom Hanks.

I don't think there is a problem with digital animation itself. There is just a complete lack of live action films for children. to me those are two seperate issues.

They were obviously trying to capture the feel of the original artwork people love so much in the book.

It is possible that they were going for a more mythic look.

It's to match the animations in the book, because they're so breathtaking.

The filming style appears to try and match the style of the animations.

I do have to say, however, it looks mildly creepy and being a big fan of the book I'm only cautiously optimistic about the movie.

to approximate the look of the pastel illustrations by Chris Van Allsburg. Special lenses, filters, a carefully controlled color palette; it was done with the "Dick Tracy" movie in 1989, it was done with "Girl with a Pearl earring", and the recent live action "Peter Pan' captured the look of of the works of Maxfield Parrish and N. C. Wyeth. The medium in this case was intended to sell the film, but it's the story, not the look of a film, that always leads to success or failure.

OK, so I animated with Disney when they were still doing traditional Feature Animation (and we've made our fair share of pointless movies that would have been better in live action, like "Pocahontas" and "the Hunchback of Notre Dame") but now with the success of Pixar, movie execs think that the medium is what sells a film, not the message. Computer animation is far, far more expensive than live action. I have many friends at Pixar and Industrial Light and Magic, and it's unreal how much time they need to put into a few feet of film (hand drawing it was much faster)!

The Polar Express looks cold and somewhat creepy to me. I read an interview with the author/illustrator of the book, who said that it needed to be done with motion capture because "animator's can't draw surprise morphing into fear". Bullshit! I've drawn such transitions many times, and they looked much better in films like "Aladdin" and Beauty and the Beast" than the motion capture in the Polar Express!

Rant off.

I was wondering if anyone else thought the blank, soulless eyes on these characters was akin to watching a "living dead" movie. I know they did something like this in the movie "Final Fantasy", uh not sure if that's the correct title, and at the time I thought they did a ok job on the faces and eyes. In the previews I've seen of Polar Express, I've barely been able to look at the people without literally getting a bit sick to my stomack.

I don't know a thing about the technique they used to make this film, but I much prefer Pixar. Oh, and I've never heard of Polar Express. No kids.