What to Watch Next If You Liked The Polar Express

For this year's Christmas special, Cinema Paradiso marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Robert Zemeckis's pioneering animation, The Polar Express.

Adapted from a much-loved picture book by Chris Van Allsburg and combining cosy nostalgia with state-of-the-art techniques, Robert Zemeckis's The Polar Express was one of the most anticipated films of 2004. Given that more money had been spent on it than any other animated movie in Hollywood history, everyone was hoping for a new Christmas classic. But the reviews were mixed and Brad Bird's The Incredibles prevented the picture from topping the box-office charts.

Word spread that the 3-D and Imax versions were spectacular. Yet the same misgivings kept cropping up on the new social media platforms and many of them referred to the 'uncanny valley' effects caused by the groundbreaking motion-capture technology that Zemeckis had used to create his characters. Ranging from the mournful to the downright hostile, such mutterings can still be heard two decades later. Notwithstandingly, as Cinema Paradiso discovers, The Polar Express has become a cult favourite, with several branch lines in the real world.

Turning the Page

Published in 1985, Chris Van Allsburg's children's book, The Polar Express, is just 32 pages long. Its storyline is simple and sparely told. But the oil pastel illustrations epitomise the maxim that a picture can paint a thousand words, as they are wondrously atmospheric and evoke the lingering magic of Christmasses past.

Van Allsburg was born into a Dutch family on 18 June 1949, two years after his older sister, Karen. As a child in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he developed a talent for making model cars and planes and decided to become a sculptor after studying at the University of Michigan and the Rhode Island School of Design.

As it was so cold in his rented studio after 5pm (when the landlord turned off the heating), Van Allsburg used to keep himself amused in his apartment by making sketches. He thought nothing of them, but his wife, Lisa, felt he could turn his hand to illustration and showed him some books from the elementary school where she taught art. However, he was far from impressed, later recalling, 'They were uniformly sentimental and condescending stories accompanied by art that was the same. If this is what publishers wanted to put into books, then clearly, there could be no interest in the pictures I wanted to make.'

Convinced there would be a demand for her husband's work, Lisa showed a portfolio to a number of publishers. But Van Allsburg was uninspired by the texts he was offered and it was only at the suggestion of editor Walter Lorraine that he realised that needed to tell stories of his own. In 1979, he published The Garden of Abdul Gasazi, which was nominated for the prestigious Caldecott Medal. He would win the award for both Jumanji (1981) and The Polar Express, with both books being turned into major films.

Robin Williams headlined Joe Johnston's take on Jumanji (1997) and Hollywood has since taken a keen interest in Van Allsburg's work. A sequel to his jungle adventure, Jon Favreau's Zathura: A Space Adventure, reached screens in 2005, around about the time that Sam Weisman started work on The Widow's Broom, only for this collaboration between Paramount and Nickelodeon Movies to stall. In 2020, Paramount also acquired the rights to Van Allsburg's 1983 tome, The Wreck of the Zephyr. Two years earlier, 20th Century- Fox had announced that it had contacted Paul Feig about directing a version of the 1993 volume, The Sweetest Fig. Neither film has yet to be made, but Van Allsburg fans live in hope.

The opening section of The Polar Express is set in Grand Rapids and Van Allsburg has explained that he had been inspired to write the story because of his fond memories of childhood visits to the Herpolsheimer's and Wurzburg's department stores. He also wanted to explore an image that he couldn't get out of his mind: 'A gasping, old steam engine waiting in a winter woodland setting, with only a few empty cars and a lone figure (a boy in pajamas and a bathrobe) approaching. Where, I wondered, was the train going and who was the boy who hesitantly stepped toward it, each footstep crushing through snow?'

At the film's premiere, Van Allsburg divulged another secret from his youth. When he was a boy, the steam locomotive, Pere Marquette 1225, had been on display near the Spartan Stadium on the campus of Michigan State University in East Lansing and he had enjoying clambering over it when the family attended football games. He had always remembered that the train's number, 1225, matched Christmas Day on the calendar and the film-makers based their engine on the original 2-8-4 Berkshire N-1 class loco, which had since become the property of the Steam Railroading Institute in Owosso.

Yet Van Allsburg had been highly reluctant to sell the rights to his book to a film studio. He changed his mind in 1999, however, when he heard that Tom Hanks was keen to play the conductor and Santa Claus after having come to love the story through reading it to his children. As the actor explained, 'There's something very stunning, quite frankly, about Chris Van Allsburg's paintings. They're not drawings. They're impressionistic versions of this child's house and what it was like to be on a train and all the aspects of the adventure that they go on. It was always a very tactile feeling that I got from reading the book as well as a very elegant, simple, but complicated, sophisticated story about what Christmas means to each and every one of us.'

Significantly, Hanks was willing to accept Van Allsburg's insistence that the action could not be animated. He persuaded Castle Rock Entertainment to co-produce the film with his own Playtone company, with Van Allsburg serving as an executive producer. By March 2000, the deal was struck and work stared on a screenplay.

All Aboard

One Christmas Eve in the 1950s, a young boy is wrestling with his doubts about the existence of Santa Claus. He consults an encyclopaedia entry on the North Pole and peruses the press cuttings he has assembled about department store Santas going on strike. Burning his arm on the radiator, as he gazes out of the window at the snow falling outside, he peeks through the keyhole to watch his parents putting his sister Sarah to bed.

Dashing back under the covers, he lies motionless when his parents look in on him. But he has one eye open and hears his father claiming that he's so deeply asleep that not even a speeding train could wake him. No sooner have they closed the bedroom door, however, than the boy hears a clanking sound in the garden. Hurriedly, he puts on his dressing gown and slippers and sneaks downstairs. Venturing into the snow, he is astonished to see a large steam train looming out of the darkness. Hearing a voice, he sees a conductor checking his watch, as he is determined to get to the North Pole on time.

Puzzled, the boy is reluctant to climb aboard. But his curiosity gets the better of him, as the prospect of meeting Santa is too tempting to resist and he takes his seat in a carriage with several other children. A know-all bombards him with facts about the engine, but a Black girl is more welcoming, as she shares her excitement at taking the trip of a lifetime.

Out of the window, they see the lights shining on the displays in the town's department stores. But the train soon stops beside a shack on the other side of the tracks, where a gaunt looking boy is waiting. He has never known Christmas and is wary of boarding the train. But, while the conductor is eager to get underway, the Hero Boy pulls the emergency cord to allow Billy to climb into the adjoining carriage.

Initially, the conductor is cross that they have lost time. But he commends Hero Boy on his actions and orders hot chocolate for everyone. It's served in a whirl of tuneful efficiency by a team of waiters. However, Hero Girl hides her cup under her seat so that she can take it to warm up Billy, who looks cold sitting all alone. In making her way through to the next carriage with the conductor, however, she drops her ticket and Hero Boy watches helplessly as it floats away on the wind. It flutters down a mountainside into a forest, where wolves are prowling. An eagle swoops down to pick it up and tries to feed it to a nestling. But the baby bird spits out the ticket and it forms into a snowball that rolls alongside the track so that Hero Boy can snatch it when it wafts into the carriage and sticks to the inside of the door.

Unfortunately, the conductor has already discovered that Hero Girl has lost her ticket and he escorts her out of the carriage. Fearing that she will be thrown off the train, Hero Boy goes looking for her. As he can't make the jump over the couplings, he climbs on to the train's snow-covered roof, where he is surprised to encounter a hobo washing his socks. He cackles when he hears where Hero Boy is heading and the child is so convinced that he's trapped in a bad dream that he pinches himself and rubs snow in his face in an effort to wake himself up.

He hops on to the hobo's back when he slips on a pair of skis and starts to make his way towards the engine. Calling back, he warns Hero Boy about an approaching tunnel and he is relieved to reach the cabin in one piece. Much to his amazement, he discovers that the conductor has left Hero Girl to drive the train, while engineer Steamer and fireman Smokey are replacing the express's headlight. She points out the various controls and Hero Boy has to apply the brake when a herd of caribou wanders on to the track.

Tugging on Smokey's beard to generate a series of yelps that drives the animals away, the conductor finds himself and the two kids stranded above the cowcatcher, as the locomotive picks up speed because the cotter pin has come loose from the throttle. Smokey replaces it with a hairpin, but the missing metal bounces out of the cabin and embeds itself in the ice of a frozen lake, which starts to crack. Steamer holds his course and just reaches the track leading up a steep incline before the ice shatters. Such is the gradient, however, that the engine hurtles along like a rollercoaster. But normal service is resumed and, as Hero Girl and Billy sing about the meaning of Christmas on the observation deck, they realise that they have reached their destination.

Following a hair-raising diversion after Billy and his heroic pals get trapped in a runaway caboose, the trio teeter their way across a steepling section of track before winding up in a giant workshop. In the delivery office, elves use a bank of computer screens to check the Naughty and Nice lists. But Billy gets so excited at seeing a gift with his name on it that he clings on to it, as it's deposited into a large red sack. The others try to haul him out, only to discover Know-It-All hiding in the hope of finding himself a special present.

As luck would have it, the kids reach the square at the centre of the North Pole just as the excited elves start singing 'Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town'. Pleased to see everyone in the right place, the conductor looks on benevolently, as Santa has a word with each child before deciding to bestow a special gift on Hero Boy. He asks for a bell from the reindeer harness because he hadn't been able to hear it when the sleigh first appeared, but it had tinkled when Santa came into view.

Returning to the carriage, after the conductor had punched bespoke words into each of their tickets, the children settle down for the journey home. They wave Billy off, as he rushes inside to see if he has received the gift that had borne his name. But Hero Boy sits quietly, as he knows that the sleigh bell has fallen through a hole in his dressing-gown pocket. He also feels sad at having to bid farewell to Hero Girl, Know-It-All, and the conductor. However, he is thrilled next morning to find that Santa has returned the bell with a special message and the voice of the grown Hero Boy reveals that, even though it eventually fell silent for Sister Sarah, he can still hear it ring, as it does 'for all who truly believe'.

Shovel All the Coal In

Rob Reiner was originally attached to direct The Polar Express, with Hanks starring as the conductor. Plans were made for a December 2001 release. But it soon became clear that Van Allsburg's preferred live-action version was going to be expensive and difficult to make. After Reiner withdrew, the project went into abeyance and it was only in February 2002 that Robert Zemeckis came aboard.

He already had experience of working with boundary-pushing technology, having melded animated and human characters in the same shot in Who Framed Roger Rabbi (1988). Furthermore, he had directed the first picture to use computer-generated imagery to alter the human body in Death Becomes Her (1992) and had found ways to integrate Tom Hanks into archive footage in Forrest Gum (1994), which had earned them both Oscars. Moreover, Zemeckis and Hanks had worked together since on Cast Away (2000), which had brought Hanks another Best Actor nomination.

While writing the screenplay with William Broyles, Jr., Zemeckis realised that he had to expand upon Van Allsburg's original plotline. Thus, he built up the roles of Hero Girl, Know-it-all, and Billy the Lonely Boy, while also inventing the character of Hobo. Having looked through some of his old toys for inspiration, Zemeckis got the idea to include an Ebenezer Scrooge puppet in the carriage filled with discarded toys. Most significantly however, the scripting process convinced Zemeckis that a live-action approach was going to be impossible. Mindful of Hanks's promise to the author, however, he suggested using motion-capture technology so that the visuals would retain a human quality that would enable them to stand apart from standard issue CGI. As the director later explained, 'I didn't want the movie to look like animated cartoons. But live action would look awful, and it would be impossible - it would cost $1 billion instead of $160 million.'

He also insisted that cartooning or digitising would compromise the artistry of Van Allsburg's illustrations, which were 'so much a part of the emotion of the story'. Despite his confidence in mo-cap, early outings had not gone down well with critics or audiences. A rare India-USA co-production, Alan Jacobs and Evan Ricks's Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists (2000) had been the first feature to be created exclusively using motion capture, with the mo-cap footage taking three months to accumulate at the Raleigh Studios in Los Angeles in 1997. However, this $30 million movie made only $30,000 in theatres.

The technology had improved considerably by the time mo-cap was used to enable Andy Serkis to create Gollum for Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy of The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The Return of the King (2003). Nevertheless, the backers were concerned that they were going to have a repeat of Hironobu Sakaguchi's Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) on its hands, even though this has gone on to become a cult classic of its kind.

As the deal between Zemeckis's ImageMovers and DreamWorks had expired, he had signed to Warner Bros., who had agreed to finance and provide studio space for The Polar Express in return for distribution rights. Still needing extra resources, however, Zemeckis had offered a partnership to Universal Studios. When they declined, he convinced Steve Bing to stump up half of the film's budget, even though his Shangri-La Entertainment company had only produced one previous picture, Adam Rifkin's Night At the Golden Eagle (2001).

Having tested CGI and blue-screen acting processes, Zemeckis also assessed the green-screen techniques that George Lucas had employed on his Star Wars prequel entries, Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999), Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002), and Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005). Then, Ken Ralston, a special effects artist who had worked on Roger Rabbit and Forrest Gump told Zemeckis about the 'performance-capture' process that had been developed at Sony Pictures by the Imageworks team. Like motion-capture, this relied on sensors attached to the body to make a digital record of an actor's physical movements so that a full character could be rendered over this choreographed digi-skeleton. The equipment was still being refined and animation supervisor David Schaub spent three months producing eight examples of performance-capture footage to reassure the Warner front office that they were not going too far out on a limb, even though the unit would be learning on the job.

Once this decision had been confirmed, Zemeckis asked Hanks to play all of the characters during the perf-cap recording. Having twice played Woody in John Lasseter's Toy Story (1995) and Toy Story 2 (1999), Hanks was well-versed in doing voiceover work. But he would have to juggle several characters in the cramped 10x10 soundstage and the task was complicated by the fact that there would be no make-up breaks or scenery changes to give him time to make the mental switch between personas. Consequently, it was agreed that he would voice the narrator and provide the digital bodycasts of the Conductor, the Hobo, Santa Claus, the Scrooge puppet, and some of the scenes involving the Hero Boy.

In order to bulk out the portrayal, Zemeckis cast Josh Hutcherson, who had just made his feature debut in Shari Springer Berman's American Splendor (2003). Type his name into the Cinema Paradiso Searchline to trace his subsequent career trajectory, although we're willing to bet that he has never since broken wind in the face of a co-star, which was his misfortune while sitting on Hanks's shoulders while recording the scene of Hero Boy and the Hobo on the train roof.

Daryl Sabara, who had played Juni Cortez in Robert Rodriguez's Spy Kids (2001), Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams (2002), and Spy Kids 3: Game Over (2003) was chosen to provide Hero Boy's voice. Nona Gaye was cast as Hero Girl, although Darrian O Driscoll and Tinashe Jorgensen Kachingwe did additional perf-cap work, while Meagan Moore contributed the vocals. Matthew Hall sang for Billy, while Jimmy Bennett provided his speaking voice. Hayden McFarland was on hand for some supplementary perf-cap, but the bulk of the physical performance was provided by Peter Scolari, who had been friends with Hanks since they were teamed as Henry and Kip in the sitcom, Bosom Buddies (1980-82).

Character actor Michael Jeter was cast as Smokey and Steamer, but he died during production and the voicework was completed by André Sogliuzzo. Zemeckis chose new wife, Leslie Harter, to do the perf-cap for Sister Sarah and the voice for Hero Boy's mother. Aerosmith fans might also recognise the voices of the Elf Lieutenant and the Elf Singer, as they were both played by the band's frontman, Steven Tyler. The Elf General, by the way, was voiced by Charles Fleischer, who had taken the title role in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Although space was at a premium in the performance area, Hanks enjoyed acting out scenes in real time. 'I found,' he told IGN, 'that it is actually a return to a type of acting that acting in films does not allow you to do. It was exactly like rehearsing a play in the round. You don't have to worry about lights, angles, rails, cameras, over the shoulders coverage. We essentially did a great series of 10 or 15 minute plays in which we did it real, we did it all in real time, and when we were done Bob had everything that he needed to. So, as far as being an actor goes, it was a blast.'

Each scene shot on the black-box stage required Hanks to wear a Lycra bodysuit covered with 60 reflective dots. Before each session, he had to sit still for 50 minutes while 152 markers were affixed to his face so that every nuance of every expression could be captured. 'You forget you have them on,' he joked, 'until one falls off and someone runs across the room screaming. Suddenly, your ear is hanging on the ground.'

Sixty-five infrared cameras were strung around the set, with seven alone been trained on Hanks's face, in order to make a three-dimensional record of the data that would be needed by the rendering animators, who created digital costumes as well as CGI backdrops. This 360° perspective gave Zemeckis complete freedom to select camera angles, with an editing programme that offered him the choice of creating tilts, pans, or travelling shots without having to go to the trouble of moving a single camera. Once the viewpoint had been established, digital artists filtered in the different parts of the train, as well as the passing scenery and such atmospherics as moonlight, shadow, snow, and glorious steam.

Zemeckis strove to remain true to Van Allsburg's vision, but he made no apologies in revealing, 'We never wanted it to be photo-realistic or CG-animated. We wanted it to be somewhere in between.' As performance-capture was still in its infancy, however, there were teething troubles. Although sensors could be applied to the skin, they couldn't capture eye movement and many critics complained about the dead-eye syndrome afflicting the characters. Some even suggested that the 'uncanny valley' effect made the action feel creepy instead of enchanted, as the lack of ocular focus and expression made the characters feel more robotic than human. Given that Zemeckis was spending $1 million on each minute of film, however, he couldn't afford to wait around on the off chance that a solution could be found. As it was, shooting on the black-box sequences at the Warner studio in Burbank ran from June 2003 to May 2004.

One character who couldn't replicated by motion-capture was the Polar Express itself. In 2002, Warners arranged to study the Pere Marquette 1225 in the sidings and under steam and the resulting footage and drawings proved vital to the animators. The sound design team also recorded the noises made by the shunting wheels, the clanking couplings, the chuffing steam, and the shrieking whistle. Trainspotters noticed the differences between this vintage engine and the film loco, however, with the positioning of the headlight and the whistle and the size of the cowcatcher being particular bugbears.

The background artists also mined American railroad history for the buildings at the North Pole, which were modelled on the architecture in the Pullman district of Chicago, which had been home to the famous Pullman Company that manufactured railroad cars. The Herpolsheimer's department store seen through the train window was based on the branch in Grand Rapids that Van Allsburg knew as a child. His timeline also influenced the dating of the film action, as the Hero Boy had kept a copy of the Saturday Evening Post from 29 December 1956, which suggests that the story is set on Christmas Eve in 1957, when Van Allsburg would have been eight years old.

Zemeckis couldn't resist putting in a few details from his own past, either. The address that the conductor shouts outside the Hero Boy's house, '11344 Edbrooke', is where the director had spent his childhood in the Roseland neighbourhood of Chicago. Fans of Back to the Future (1985) will also spot that the shopping centre where the Santas are striking is the same Twin Pines Mall to which Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) had travelled 30 years back in time. They may also notice the presence of the flux capacitor in Steamer's cabin. But would they have known that the engineer (who wears Christmas tree socks) and the firemen were not created by performance-capture, as their contrasting bulk made it too difficult to use the cutting-edge technology and the pair had to settle for being created using skeletal animation rigs?

Conventional methods were also used to create the naughty boy whose face pops up on the computer screen in Santa's dispatch office. The sharp-eared will pick up that he is Steven from New Jersey, who has been accused of mistreating his sisters. This is a little joke on Zemeckis's behalf, as the terror in question is none other than Steven Spielberg, the great friend who had called him to the stage at the 67th Academy Awards to present him with the Oscar for Best Direction for Forrest Gump.

A Christmas Cracker?

Coming in at $165 million, The Polar Express was the most expensive animated film in history. According to reports, it also cost another $100 million to market the picture, which premiered at the 40th Chicago International Film Festival on 21 October 2004. It opened in the United States on 7 November and went into wider distribution three days later. The aim was to drum up word of mouth before Thanksgiving and then reap the benefit of repeat viewings in the run-up to Christmas.

Alongside the standard 35mm print, Warners also released a 3-D edition using the same digital data that had been amassed for the 2-D version. In addition, an IMAX 3D edition was also produced and, thanks to the new-fangled 6.1 surround sound mix, this offered an immersive experience that proved hugely popular. Indeed, statistics show that it generated a quarter of the eventual gross and it remained the most successful IMAX release until James Camerson's Avatar (2009) took the crown.

Despite trailing The Incredibles in the box-office charts, the film earned $23.3 million from its opening weekend, in spite of some decidedly mixed reviews. The esteemed Roger Ebert admitted that the action was creepy in places, but claimed it also had 'a haunting, magical quality' and 'a deeper, shivery tone, instead of the mindless jolliness of the usual Christmas movie'. But The Guardian opined that this 'railway adventure to meet Santa runs off the rails', while Rolling Stone deemed it 'a failed and lifeless experiment in which everything goes wrong'.

Nevertheless, The Polar Express received Oscar nominations for Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Song for 'Believe'. This was written by Glen Ballard and Alan Silvestri and went on to win a Grammy, while the soundtrack album went gold. Ultimately, the picture would rack up $318.2 million worldwide from its various re-releases. Moreover, it made the 2006 Guinness Book of World Records as the first film to be made entirely by performance- capture technology. At 93 minutes, it remains the longest perf-cap picture, even though Zemeckis would return to the technology for parts of Beowulf (2007), A Christmas Carol (2009), and Welcome to Marwen (2018), as well as for Simon Wells's Mars Needs Moms (2011), which Zemeckis co-produced.

A video game was released in time for Christmas, in which the Scrooge puppet tries to prevent the passengers from reaching the North Pole. A toy manufacturer also released tie-in train sets, while railway companies in the US, Canada, and Britain started offering Polar Express rides from December 2005. Two decades on, these are still going strong across the UK, with new routes being added almost every year. A number of theme parks have also hosted a 4-D ride inspired by the film, which has been made available on numerous home entertainment formats since 2005. Cinema Paradiso users can rent it on high-quality DVD, Blu-ray, Blu-ray 3D, and 4K. Try finding that kind of choice anywhere else.

Over time, critics came to see The Polar Express as a bold step and a landmark in the history of screen technology. But the doubters remain vocal in print and online, with one branding the picture 'one of the worst looking cinematic disasters of all time'. Persistent criticisms remain about the dead eyes and the zombie-like impassivity of the characters. Many feel there are too many scary sequences for young children, with the carriage full of abandoned toys giving them the screaming meemies. Others dislike the inclusion of so many video game-style action sequences, which seem at odds with the 1950s setting.

Some express dismay that the story encourages children to accept rides from strangers, while others complain that the scenes on the train roof set a terrible example, even though the conductor later urges kids not to attempt to duplicate the daredevil skills of the crack elf security team. The facial features of the elves and their New York accents also cause offence in some quarters, while others want to know why the female elves were allowed to attend the post-send-off party when previously they had been conspicuous by their absence in the square.

Gripes are also made about other inconsistencies in the story. It's noted that the train has five carriages in some shots and up to 20 in others, while some commentators are confused why a story about the existence Santa would include a character whose poverty means that he has no knowledge of Christmas, when the sole criterion for receiving gifts from Santa is a child's naughtiness or niceness. Doubts have also been raised about the film's 'believe' message, when Hero Boy's faith in Santa is rekindled by a personal encounter that no other children could have.

Similarly, others query the fate of the baby that Hero Boy's obviously pregnant mother is carrying, as the narrator only refers to himself and his sister in the closing speech about the audibility of the sleigh bell. Theories also abound that Hero Boy had grown up to be the conductor and that the hobo is his very own Ghost of Christmas Past and Future rolled into one. The fact that the conductor is forever consulting his watch has linked him in some minds to the White Rabbit in Lewis Carroll's much-filmed Alice in Wonderland, which, of course, turned out to be only a dream.

The oneiric factor is key to explaining away many of the grumbles about the story, as it imposes a dream logic upon it that would have delighted the Surrealists. In sleep, why shouldn't a train appear outside a suburban house without a track and why should a boy not climb on to its treacherous snow-covered roof to return a ticket that had been on an unfeasibly tortuous journey after being wafted off on the wind? Similarly, why should a small girl not be charged with driving the engine while the grown-ups clear pesky critters off the track? Dreams make unreliable narrators of us all and a smoother ride in this particular picture can easily be had by going with the flow.

As for Robert Zemeckis, he remains fascinated with the techno side of cinema and has used digital de-ageing to present younger versions of the characters played by Tom Hanks and Robin Wright (reunited three decades after Forrest Gump) in Here (2024), an adaptation of a 2014 non-linear graphic novel by Richard McGuire that makes use of split screens to chronicle events that took place on a single plot of land between prehistoric times and the present day.

No one is saying, however, whether Zemeckis and Hanks have boarded The Polar Express 2, which has long been rumoured to be in the works. Midway through 2024, producer Gary Goetzman confirmed that the sequel was in production and a trailer dropped in early December showing scenes featuring a conductor who sure looks and sounds a lot like a certain two-time Oscar winner. Only time will tell. In the meantime, we just have to believe.

Happy Christmas to one and all from everyone at Cinema Paradiso.