Dear Little Bald Bastard,
What's your favorite part of the holidays?
- Elf Help
Dear Elf Help,
My favorite part of the Winter goodwillgasm is when it's finally over. The trappings are packed away and the insane amount of refuse and discarded wrapping is hauled away to the landfill. Radio stations shelve the all-Christmas tunes and go back to their brain-numbingly horrible soft rock and adult contemporary schedules. People drop the rotting veneer of holiday spirit and go back to being unbelievable pricks.
And yet, there are nuggets of real enjoyment buried amongst the vast strip mine of treacle, especially for veteran cranks like myself. One of those compact bundles of corrosive glee is the 2004 animated train wreck The Polar Express.
Screenwriter/director Robert Zemeckis is either a black-hearted, cynically commercial holiday troll or a pathetically desperate believer in the secular magic of Christmas. Whatever his motivation, Zemeckis and his team of animators managed to turn a 32 page children's book into a feature length Christmas freakout.
I love this movie because it fails so spectacularly. It wants so hard to be a warm parable about the wonder of the season and the magic of belief, punctuated by family-friendly thrills. But despite all efforts, it steams right past the village of Holiday Charm and derails just outside of Fucking Creepyville. Here are just a few of the unsettling elements of this Christmas creepfest.
The Animation: The rich, warm painted illustrations of the book are replaced by a gasping attempt at photorealistic animation. Everything is rendered in crisp, hyperaware detail, which makes the human characters really odd to look at. To be fair, the animators are pitting their processing power against millennia of evolution teaching our brains how to interpret human faces. The result crashes right into the Uncanny Valley; the faces are too detailed to be cartoonish, but not quite human enough to be... well, human. As a result, the non-intoxicated viewer can't help but twitch a little bit every time one of the human faces is in close-up.
The Scary Train: Let's start with the fact that this train is clearly haunted. Not only is there a hobo who appears to live on top of the train, but he's a DEAD HOBO GHOST. Maybe it's just because I'm old, but I suspect I'd be too freaked out by the fact that I'd been hanging out with a dead hobo to be all that impressed by meeting Santa.
Next, let's talk about safety features. Rather, let's talk about the total lack of safety features. Why is a train, specifically intended to transport curious pre-adolescents, designed in such a way that a passenger can scamper onto the roof? And why does the track seem to be laid out in such a way as to pretty much guarantee mortal peril? Again, maybe I'm showing my age, but I think the pants-filling scares of nearly crashing and derailing several times, not to mention almost falling off the top of a moving train riding on what is essentially a roller coaster track, would put me right out of the mood to believe in a benevolent winter spirit.
The North Pole: Santa's Fortress Of Holi-tude is usually depicted as a homey place, with fireplaces and overstuffed armchairs and earnest elven workers making wooden toys by hand. Santa keeps the naughty and nice lists, but nobody worries about how he actually knows the moral balance of each child's soul. He just knows.
This is, of course, an absurdly quaint and sentimental notion. To manufacture and ship billions of toys a year would require a huge facility, armies of workers, and assembly line automation that would make Henry Ford's colon explode. To give Zemeckis credit, his North Pole, modeled after a railroad car manufacturing complex, tackles this conundrum. It's huge, cavernous, and mechanized to the hilt.
There are two issues with this approach. First, it sort of undermines the whole "belief" message. Who needs to believe in magic when there's a giant conveyor belt shuffling thousands of machine-wrapped packages off to be shipped. Second, the whole place is creepier than Grandma's thong drawer. It's massive and empty. Christmas carols play on a skipping record player, and tinny speakers echo in the vast spaces. (If Hideo Nakata ever directs a glacially-paced horror movie set at Christmas, he'll have his soundtrack.) A skeleton crew of elves mutters Yiddish slang while keeping tabs on the children of the world, peering at them on a giant bank of video monitors straight out of Orwell's dream journal. Giant machinery sits brooding, lurching to life without anyone at the controls. It's the antithesis of the traditional North Pole, and the least heartwarming place outside Hades.
The Elves: So much is wrong with the movie's version of Santa's traditional indentured servants that I have a hard time even seeing them. My brain tries to focus on other details of the scene, so that I won't have to look at them directly. To start with, they suffer from the same not-quite-lifelike facial animation plaguing the human characters. This is compounded by the exaggerated features that are supposed, I guess, to look comical, but just come off as unsettling. They look like the world's sprightliest nursing home patients, with big floppy ears, long pointy noses, and eyes that scream about centuries of cabin fever. All of this is stuck onto tiny bodies so small that, even to the 10 year old protagonist, they're running around just below eye level.
To make matters worse, there are millions of the little lunatics. When they all pack into the square surrounding the North Pole, it looks like an inside out ant colony.
The final straw is the Steven Tyler elf, who appears to sing about how the elves all rock out after Santa departs. That guy is weird enough looking, and the transposition of his features onto such a cringe-inducing character design kind of makes one wish he'd done us all the favor of overdosing when he was still doing heroin.
Know-It-All (That Fucking Kid With The Yellow Pajamas And The Horn-Rimmed Glasses): All of the other kids sound like kids. Why are they hanging out with a "child" who is clearly a middle-aged Jewish man?
Tom Hanks: I respect Tom Hanks. He's a good actor and, based on interviews I've heard, seems like a genuinely decent person. That said, why are we forced to pretend that he's a competent voice actor? Was there no other voice talent available that week? Hanks had to voice the Father, the Conductor, the Dead Hobo, the Janitor, the Guy With The Wart, and God? All of these characters are clearly Tom Hanks. The small affectations he puts on aren't enough to distinguish any of the voices from the others. Why do we have to pretend that they are?
The Difficulty Of Believing: Let me say that I am a skeptic. I like to see evidence before I believe in things, especially extraordinary things like, say, a fat guy in a sleigh who delivers toys to billions of kids in a single night. That said, how much do you need to experience before you start to buy the party line? A bell flies off a reindeer's harness and lands at your feet and now you finally buy it all? We're talking about a kid who has literally climbed into Santa's actual toy bag, and been dropped out of the sky into his sleigh. Somebody tell the Tooth Fairy that she'd better punch this kid in the nuts if she doesn't have all night.
In short, it seems like the message of this film is something like "you'd better believe, or we'll freak you out until you do." Alright, Mr. Zemeckis, you win. Just don't make me look at Steven Tyler elf anymore.
