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Monday, December 13, 2004 Volume VI Number 50
by Ken Kemp
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he technology of entertainment is changing by the day. Here’s one with eye-popping effects that’ll keep you going with a wide-eyed sense of wonder and amazement. It’s big budget animation. Catch it at Imax in 3-D and it’s even more spectacular. |
It has a look and feel that is all its own. There’s never been anything like it. It was created with a new technique in movie making, combining human movements with computer animation. The final images are true to the illustrators of the original children’s 1985 thirty two page book by Chris Van Allsburg. Since its publication (before the movie version was made) it sold over five million copies. The author of the narrative is also the illustrator. He not only wrote the stories, but he created the images. They fascinated the parents and children who read the book, and then presented a huge challenge to movie maker Robert Zemeckis.
This is not Van Allsburg’s first book turned feature movie. He wrote and illustrated another children’s book – Jumanji – which also was developed into a major motion picture staring Robin Williams.
So the world of Polar Express really came from the imagination of Caldecott Medal winning author and illustrator. It’s the story of a little boy, the age of his target readers – five to eight years – who encounters his first crisis of faith. He’s been tipped off by a friend and has stumbled across evidences that Santa Claus isn’t real. He’s imaginary, they say, a hoax foisted on innocent children all around the world. As his head hits the pillow on the night before Christmas, he’s troubled and has difficulty getting to sleep. In past years it was the wild anticipation of opening presents from Santa that kept him awake. This year, it’s the disturbing thought that his friend just might be right – Santa’s an empty illusion.
The windows rattle, like an earthquake, as the sound of an approaching railroad train shakes the ground.
The audio track of the movie evoked wonderful memories for me. I still remember standing on the platform of the station, early morning with my dad when I was about this age, maybe second or third grade. On Saturday mornings, he’s take me along with him downtown to “the plant” where he worked, and I’d assist with some clean up around the shop. We’d wait for the train – a stream engine pulling passenger cars from our suburban Wheaton into the big city of Chicago. There’s serious anticipation for a little boy standing there behind a yellow line, looking down those parallel rails tracking into the distance and around the bend, waiting for the appearance of that massive steel engine, the pointed cowcatcher clearing the way and the big round cylinder of a boiler and the smoke stack spewing steam into the sky and a powerful crankshaft driving all four spoked steel power-wheels and the engineer looking out the side window down the track at us and I would pull an imaginary rope from above me as a signal hoping he would sound the whistle, a steam whistle, loud enough to be heard all over town as a wake up call to the whole neighborhood. He always did. How anyone could sleep through the arrival of a railroad train was beyond me. After a long wait (dad always got us there in plenty of time) there it was, comin’ ‘round the bend, belching steam in great rhythmic explosions of raw power, clicking and clacking and clanging steel against steel rolling up to the station, squealing brakes, slowing the tremendous weight of the engine and all the cars and the people to a halt just at the precise stopping point and I could feel the sound.
I’d look up at my dad and he’d look back at me and we’d just smile. Then we’d climb aboard.
Such was the arrival of the Polar Express in front of the boy’s house. But only he heard it. He wandered out into the snow, and looked over the steam train and the lighted cars against a moonlit night sky as snowflakes floated down in a midnight Christmas magic that left the boy starry-eyed and frightened and curious all at once.
Van Allsburg’s steam train, re-created by Zemackis’s team in the movie, is maybe the coolest train I’ve ever seen. Sometimes art can trump reality. Maybe because even in the real world, there’s a magic that transcends the real machine pulling up beside you just a few feet beyond the yellow line that makes that moment in time bigger and grander than life itself. And maybe that’s why, all these years later, I remember it so well. The imprint on my memory is indelible, and that’s the magic. An artist can capture that. The Polar Express does.
He’s a boy without a name. At least for us. That way, he can be anyone we chose. He’s a universal boy, really, because every child goes through this passage, at just about this time in life. A child finally reaches that developmental stage when he is capable of distinguishing between the world he can see and touch and feel, and that other world that belongs to the imagination. He’s confronted with a question that will haunt him for the rest of his life: what then, is real? And then beyond that, what can I trust? Whom can I trust? In this world of conflicting values and opposing theories, what will I embrace as my own view of the world?
So the conductor meets him at the step, lantern in one hand, clock in the other, inviting him aboard. And there, standing in a snowdrift as flakes swirl around him there in his own front yard, he’s faced with a hard choice. Do I listen to my heart, and climb aboard even though I don’t know where we are going? Or do I listen to my head, and reject all this nonsense, and climb back in bed where I belong?
The boy climbs aboard.
* * * * * *
I’m tempted to retell the entire story in my own words. I’ve said quite enough for today. Van Allsburg told it well enough.
* * * * * *
It’s Monday morning, you are a leader.
You still remember it - that crisis that hit when you first heard the “truth” about Santa. The news probably came from some merciless ten year old, heady over the evidence in his possession and callous in his knowledge of how the revelation would shake the foundations, and keep you awake that night.
I hope you are old enough to remember what a steam train felt like from the platform on a cold snowy morning, but if not, the movie will give you a pretty good idea.
But mostly, I hope that some of the magic will spill over this busy season. You and I need it.
It happens when we take time to listen. It happens when we open our eyes, and see things that other’s so easily miss.
The little boy got on the train, and what an adventure it was.
At one point, the Conductor tells the boy and his friends, “Seeing is believing. But sometimes - the most important things in life are the things we cannot see.”
Let’s get on the train.
Let’s look and listen and feel, and see what’s really real.
Posted in Valley Center, California
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2004
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