All Aboard!

Go see The Polar Express.

We went to see it last night with the guys and it was fantastic. The animation was up there with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within but the story actually made sense, unlike the FF movie :)

The only problem is that computer animation still has a problem properly rendering a human face on kids and blemish-free women without making them look like their made of plastic. I find that if you have a character that is older and has wrinkles, moles, etc. then it can look scarily real. If there isn't anything on their face to break up the skin texture, you end up with a very good looking doll. It's one thing if you're doing something like Shrek which is more of a cartoon. In something like The Polar Express that is striving for realism (after a fashion) it just looks weird.

That said, there were so many set pieces throughout the movie that no sooner had I been blown away by one sequence than another equally stunning sequence would start. A lot of the movie used the sort of IMAX-ish first-person perspective so that you'd feel like you're in the front of a roller-coaster car, free-falling through space. It was worth seeing on the big screen just for that.

The one thing that did strike me was how creepy the North Pole city was. It was like some weird Soviet-era factory city with a lot of Bing Crosby being piped everywhere. I certainly wouldn't want to visit!

Even though it had far fewer eviscerations and somewhat less time-travel than I'm used to seeing in a movie, I was blown away with how good it was. It could have been something schmaltzy and 'kiddie', but it was one of those family movies that the entire family could actually enjoy seeing.

Ok. Enough superlatives for me for one day.