All Aboard

I have a hunch that many of us secretly wish we could take a train to the North Pole.

This evening, my roommates and I hosted an ugly Christmas sweater and appetizer-based dinner party. We cooked all day, cleaned the house, turned on the seasonal music and lights and donned our most hideous sweaters and sweatshirts. When our guests arrived, we filled our plates with hummus and bruschetta and settled in with ABC Family’s 25 Days of Christmas on TV.

Tonight’s movie was “The Polar Express,” the 2004 computer-animated film based on Chris Van Allsburg’s popular children’s Christmas book. The book is magical and held a special place in all our guests’ memories of the holiday season. One friend even mentioned her family reads the book every Christmas Eve.

It was interesting to note, then, that few of us liked the movie. I tried throughout the evening to figure out why. Was it the typical argument of a book just being better than the movie? Was it the plot elements the screenplay added—such as a scary drifter character on top of the train who fights with the little boy—that strayed too far from the original story? Or was is the slightly creepy effect of computer-animated people? I lean more toward the last possibility. (Why not hire the actors, rather than simply using their voices? The conductor looks just like Tom Hanks anyway.) I realized the answer may be a combination of all three problems. For those of us who grew up reading the book, the movie’s twisted storyline and weird computer animations are too much of a departure from the enchanting original story. Perhaps the producers would have done better to make “The Polar Express” a short film rather than feature-length.

But no matter the issues with the movie, it provided a nice opportunity to see the connection we all had with the story. For a children’s book, it has made a remarkable impact—at least on a small group of college students.