Chris Landreth observed small details of movement to help him bring his CG humans to life realistically.

And he studied the important role that ambiguity plays in making performances feel real. “I show a scene from Citizen Kane,” says Landreth, “Where Orson Welles, as Kane, is trashing his ex wife’s bedroom — throwing around suitcases and books — knocking things over. Then I stop the film and defy the audience at any point to find a recognizable pose.” In fact, the overlapping action is so complete that you can’t even think in terms of poses.

Then there is the surprising range of facial expressions throughout this scene. Though Welles is clearly in a violent rage, his face is not necessarily showing anger. Instead, at one point we see concentration, at another befuddlement and at another serenity. “Taken as a whole it looks like a natural acting job,” says Landreth, “But taken in parts it’s bizarre. He picks up something and his face is full of calmness and that’s a quarter of a second before he hurls the object across the room.”

So what does that tell you about real anticipation versus the cartoon convention?

“What that tells you is that the face can be at complete cross purposes to what the action is conveying,” says Landreth, “The anticipation may be so far in advance of thinking and doing that there is no unified front at any one time. So you have to overlap action not only in the poses but in different parts of the body in order to realistically convey what a character’s psychological state is throughout a sequence of action.”

Not only does this make performance more real, it also makes characters more interesting. Why? Because it reveals internal conflict. And not just grand dramatic conflict either. “It can also be very mundane,” explains Landreth, “And moment to moment in a way that has nothing to do with drama.”

Or, I would say, has everything to do with submerged drama, which is not necessarily going to be fully revealed but helps drive the action anyway. One way or the other, this takes us to another key point, which is a rethinking of moving holds.

“Most of Ryan would qualify as a moving hold,” says Landreth, “It’s two people not really doing much and animators will tell you that’s hard to do. It’s easier to make Spider-Man do backflips than to do two guys sitting around and make it engaging.”

At the heart of Ryan comes a moment which takes the challenge of the moving hold to its extreme. This is when Landreth says that he’d like to see Larkin beat alcohol and for 20 long seconds Larkin doesn’t do anything. He just sits there, downcasts his eyes, sniffs, twitches his shoulders, gives his head a little jerk and then barks out, “WHAT?!”

What Landreth has given us here is an advanced thinking moment — not just a pause, not just a shift of expression representing a thinking moment but a detailed depiction of the brain beginning to fire parts off parts of the body before releasing emotion. It’s a feat, Landreth feels, which would be very difficult for a 2D animator to pull off without wanting (or maybe needing) to fill in that 20 seconds with something.

Portraying Larkin accurately, even in such subtle moments, meant accommodating his unique way of gesturing. Breaking away from the “one gesture per accent” standard is a hallmark of Landreth’s approach. And that demands a higher level of observation and innovation to come up with an appropriate strategy for each character.

In Larkin’s case, his gestures are all over the place, often preceding his words or lagging after them, underscoring the idea that you can’t pose this stuff. But unlike the classical approach, Landreth’s team did not exaggerate this key characteristic. Rather, Landreth says, “We tried to capture it.”

Capture it they did. In fact, they captured a whole person and all by animating from scratch. This, of course, brings the technical approach of The Polar Express to mind.

The performances in Polar Express were also captured but digitally, with an advanced version of motion capture called performance capture, which is capable of picking up even subtle movement. The captured work was then rendered digitally to give the whole film the luminous feeling of a moving oil painting. So how, then, does Polar Express’s style of capturing compare to the results in Ryan?