The Polar Express movie review (2004) | Roger Ebert

Santa, in this version, is a good and decent man, matter-of-fact and serious: a professional man, doing his job. The elves are like the crowd at a political rally. A sequence involving a bag full of toys is seen from a high angle that dramatizes Santa’s operation, but doesn’t romanticize it; this is not Jolly St. Nick, but Claus Inc. There is indeed something a little scary about all those elves with their intense, angular faces and their mob mentality.

That’s the magic of “The Polar Express”: It doesn’t let us off the hook with the usual reassuring Santa and Christmas cliches. When a helicopter lifts the bag of toys over the town square, it knocks a star off the top of the Christmas tree, and of course an elf is almost skewered far below. When Santa’s helpers hitch up the reindeer, they look not like tame cartoon characters, but like skittish thoroughbreds. And as for Lonely Boy, although he does make the trip and get his present, and is fiercely protective of it, at the end of the movie, we suspect his troubles are not over, and that loneliness may be his condition.

There are so many jobs and so many credits on this movie that I don’t know whom to praise, but there are sequences here that are really very special. Some are quiet little moments, like a reflection in a hubcap. Some are visual masterstrokes, like a camera angle that looks straight up through a printed page, with the letters floating between us and the reader. Some are story concepts, like the train car filled with old and dead toys being taken back to the North Pole for recycling. Some are elements of mystery, like the Hobo, who is helpful and even saves Hero Boy’s life but is in a world of his own up there on top of the train and doesn’t become anybody’s buddy (when he disappears, his hand always lingers a little longer than his body).

“The Polar Express” is a movie for more than one season; it will become a perennial, shared by the generations. It has a haunting, magical quality because it has imagined its world freshly and played true to it, sidestepping all the tiresome Christmas cliches that children have inflicted on them this time of year. The conductor tells Hero Boy he thinks he really should get on the train, and I have the same advice for you.

Note: I’ve seen the movie twice, once in the IMAX 3-D process that will be available in larger markets. New, oversized 3-D glasses, big enough to fit over your own glasses, light enough so you can forget them, made this the best 3-D viewing experience I’ve ever had. If there’s a choice, try the IMAX version. Or go twice. This is a movie that doesn’t wear out.