Polar Express: The Cutting Edge Animation

Polar Express The Cutting Edge Animation
If there's any doubt that the future of movie technology is reaching new heights, that should be dispelled by the end of the year, when Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis' adaptation of Chris Van Allsburg's prizewinning storybook The Polar Express takes a new approach to computer animation.

Two years ago, Hanks picked up the movie rights to Chris Van Allsburg's book, which he regularly read to his kids at Christmas time. He brought the project to his frequent collaborator Robert Zemeckis, who wrote a script based on the book. The question was how they could bring Allsburg's beautiful oil painting illustrations to life. Zemeckis had animation experience from his groundbreaking work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit while Hanks provided the voice in Pixar Films' first big hit Toy Story and its sequel, and they had used computers when making Forrest Gump to transplant Tom Hanks' character into some historical footage. Making The Polar Express as a computer-animated film seemed the most logical way to go, although they were aware of the limitations of going that route.

They decided to use a new technique dubbed Performance Capture, which would allow an actor of Hanks' caliber to perform the entire movie, rather than simply supplying the voices like in regular computer animated movies. A simpler form of this technology was used to create