Will The Polar Express’ bold attempt to recreate Chris Van Allsburg’s book result in something magical or creepy? © 2004 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved.

So why do we go to the movies? To see something great, to escape a bit, to watch superhuman characters do ordinary things — or ordinary characters perform superhuman tasks? To eat popcorn in the dark? Of course, those of us in the visual effects industry (or vfx-adjacent), go to watch our friends’ work, to understand first-hand why we haven’t seen them for months; to see what wonders they’ve been creating in their darkened 18% gray cubicles. We go for the explosions, certainly, but why did we love Spider-Man? Because Spidey looked great? Sure, but more importantly, all the post-screening jabber was how surprisingly good the story was. Why didn’t we hear much about The Day After Tomorrow? Because there was just too much disbelief to suspend.

I’m really wondering how I’ll feel about The Polar Express. I’m so nervous about this film. Every preview I see creeps me out and I really want to like it — to believe that this is another attempt to conjure a magical world with extraordinary images. But so far, the characters seem eerily real, but not quite, like something’s missing. I know that the idea was to recreate the painterly look of the book, but Chris Van Allsburg’s book is magical; making faithful xeroxes of his characters seems to result in some odd kind of forgery where both the original and the copy suffer. I really hope I’m wrong. But remember Jumanji for a second. Made almost a decade ago, this film attempted animals of a kind way before the Mighty Joe Young remake showed how great fur could look. Yeah, I remember it wasn’t great, but I do remember that it tried something new and brave; tried to bring some new visuals to Van Allsburg’s story. It was a great attempt to put something new into practice. Maybe The Polar Express will do the same thing, and like the boy in the story, I just have to have faith.

Story holes aside, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow showed the ability to transport its viewer to another reality. ™ & © 2004 Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.

And then you look at Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. This was an awesome example of someone having an imagination and recruiting the folks available to forge that dreamscape onto the screen. OK, so the story has all kinds of holes and improbabilities; and sometimes I got the distinct impression that our actors were indeed sitting on a stage surrounded by nothing but bluescreen, but so what? My disbelief suspended, this film took me to another reality entirely, to a different world; and it left me with a feeling that I was actually watching someone live out his dream to bring his imagination to the screen. In fact, it becomes almost insignificant whether you consider the piece to be a success or a failure because what they attempted was so brave. I’m not here to comment on the work other people did (director and actors), and I don’t want to hypothesize whether the hours and days Darin Hollings, Scott E. Anderson and crew took to realize this film were well spent (Anderson likened the experience to throwing tracks down in front of a moving train), but it was two hours that made me remember what it is to create something unique. And that’s remarkable.

In 1998, composer Phillip Glass and theatrical director Robert Wilson teamed with Kleiser-Walczak for Monsters of Grace. For those of you who didn’t see this piece (and I think there were only a couple of us who did), this co-production brought together that holy triumvirate of opera, theater and visual effects. What? And, remember, this was in 1998, when idiosyncratic director Wilson knew what he wanted (basically, several odd, surrealistic images — a hand being slowly punctured; a shoe; a bicycle riding toward a house, if I remember correctly, projected 20 foot tall — in 3D), and didn’t want to hear that the technology wasn’t available to create that yet. So, brave souls that they are, Kleiser-Walczak took on a totally non-lucrative job in pursuit of art and invention. I believe that they had to go to SGI in Monterey to find cpus to render the frames, and then they released two versions within a year of each other because the shots hadn’t been rendered. Like true artists, they undertook this for the invention and it was super cool. Kudos still go to Diana Walczak and Jeff Kleiser for taking this on in pursuit of art, imagination and creation. Were these wasted pixels? Not at all. Frankly, I’d rather spend my audience dollars on this than a well-executed snowstorm.