The Polar Express was 'hammered' for being uncanny, but 'it was so groundbreaking'

Back at the beginning of the Noughties, Robert Zemeckis — director of Back To The Future and Forrest Gump — knew what he wanted his next project to be. He dreamed of making a cinematic adaptation of Chris Van Allsburg’s 1985 Christmas-themed fairytale, The Polar Express, about a train heading to meet Santa Clause, which had become a modern children’s classic. There was one small problem.

"Zemeckis had decided it would cost a billion dollars to do it live action," says Candice Alger, the movie’s motion capture producer, now. Even for a blockbuster filmmaker, this was a little too rich, so he started looking for alternative solutions.

Alger’s company, Giant Studios, had already been working with Peter Jackson to help create Gollum for Lord of the Rings via performance capture, but The Polar Express would be a whole different ballgame.

"We’re talking eight to ten characters out there at the same time, interacting with complex set pieces," recalls the movie’s motion capture supervisor Matt Madden. "And then the fact we’re the first unit. Tom Hanks is on set with Bob Zemeckis and a lot of other big actors, so we cannot be the hold-up. Every minute on that stage cost a pretty penny."

Looking back on the film two decades later, it’s important to remember how comparatively primitive performance capture was then. Avatar, the Planet of the Apes reboots and more have taken the process on exponentially, with digital characters being rendered in real-time or being able to shoot on location. But the crew working on The Polar Express faced some unique challenges.

For example, Madden and Alger’s team captured the actors’ body performance, but the only head-mounted cameras for facial capture available at the time were attached by wires, which given the complexity of the scenes, couldn’t be untethered.

"It may surprise you, but when we did a scene on the big stage, it was basically for the body capture," explains Madden (Giant worked on the body while Sony themselves were charged with the face). "Well, later that day, Tom Hanks and any other actors that had facial capture would walk to the stage next door and do the same scenes again in a 10 by 10 foot [room] surrounded by dozens of cameras in a big silo.

"If you have a scene where Tom Hanks is walking in the whole length of the train, he had to do that in 10-foot chunks, remembering where he was and where he left off. It was a bit of a nightmare from a data assembly standpoint and frankly for the actors too."

Ah yes, Tom Hanks. Thanks to the technology, the Oscar-winner plays six characters in the film, including the train conductor, Santa and amazingly, the kid at the centre of the story, known as Hero Boy.

"The props were oversized," says Alger. "You had adults playing children, so you know, everything was giant. Witnessing those particular actors trying so hard to be these childlike characters wearing those awful spandex suits, just the fact they were able to pull off any performances at all is pretty remarkable."

The whole enterprise — and the winter wonderland you see on-screen — was rendered from a room next to a set in Culver City, Los Angeles.

"We called it the Widowmaker, because it reminded us of a submarine," remembers Alger. "That’s where all the brains were."

Laughs Madden in retrospect, "We kind of joked that it did almost kill a few people."

There were ventilated wooden boxes full of hard drives at each corner of the set where all the data would be downloaded, ready to turn into digital images for Robert Zemeckis and his team to check at the end of each day.

Still, creating something entirely brand-new in special FX filmmaking (The Polar Express appears several times in the Guinness Book of World Records for its cutting-edge digital production) pulled everyone together, not least its star.

"Tom hung out with the crew," says Alger. "He bought lottery tickets for everyone, we're talking hundreds of people every week. He brought in his favourite corned beef sandwiches once a month from some deli. On Valentine's Day, he had roses for all the women."

Yet despite the film’s innovations, it’s still often brought up as an example of the ‘uncanny valley’, that unsettling feeling viewers experience when animated characters appear almost lifelike but are still slightly off.

"They got so hammered for that, but it was so groundbreaking," says Alger. "Then, facial capture was so early in the process."

Watch a trailer for The Polar Express

"You go back and look at it and the facial tech wasn't near where it is now," continues Madden. "As you can imagine, I'm prone to scanning images and I can experience physical pain when something looks wrong. When I watch go back and watch Polar, you know, I have a soft spot for it, because I can put it in context, at that time that was the leading tech. And that's kind of cool, because it puts the methodology second. You don't watch it because it was done a certain way, you watch it because you enjoy it and that's when you've done your job."

But beyond being a modern Christmas rewatch just like the book it’s based on, The Polar Express is an important achievement in film history for what it inspired.

James Cameron eventually bought out Giant Studios along with their proprietary technology in 2015, using it to create the Avatar universe. Alger worked with Spielberg on Tintin, while Madden helped build the epic visuals on the most recent Avengers’ movies.

"The advancements in this world have come in spurts, often driven by projects like [The Polar Express] where there’s a little bit of funding to make it happen," he says.

"It was uncharted territory," agrees Alger. "But now, when people find out [I] worked on it, they’re like, ‘We watch that every Christmas!’"

The Polar Express is back in select cinemas or streaming on NOW with a Sky Cinema Membership.