30 Movies to Get You Through the Holidays

The story: As Hero Boy lies awake in bed, there is a rumble in the street and a passenger train lumbers into view. The boy runs outside in his bathrobe and slippers, and the conductor advises him to get onboard. Having refused to visit a department store Santa, having let his little sister put out Santa’s milk and cookies, Hero Boy is growing alarmingly agnostic on the Santa question, and The Polar Express apparently shuttles such kids to the North Pole, where seeing is believing.

Already on board is Hero Girl, a solemn and gentle African-American, who becomes the boy’s friend, and also befriends Lonely Boy, who lives on the wrong side of the tracks and always seems sad. Another character, Know-It-All, is one of those kids who can’t supply an answer without sounding obnoxious about it. These four are the main characters, in addition to the conductor, a hobo who lives on top of the train, Santa, and countless elves.

There’s an interesting disconnect between the movie’s action and its story. The action is typical thrill-ride stuff, with The Polar Express careening down a “179-degree grade” and racing through tunnels with a half-inch of clearance, while Hero Boy and the hobo ski the top of the train to find safety before the tunnel. At the North Pole, there’s another dizzying ride when the kids spin down a corkscrewing toy chute.

Those scenes are skillful, but expected. Not expected is a dazzling level of creativity in certain other scenes. Hero Girl’s lost ticket, for example, flutters through the air with as much freedom as the famous floating feather at the start of Forrest Gump. When hot chocolate is served on the train, dancing waiters materialize with an acrobatic song and dance. And the North Pole looks like a turn-of-the-century German factory town, filled with elves who not only look mass-produced but may have been, since they mostly have exactly the same features (this is not a cost-cutting device, but an artistic decision).

Santa, in this version, is a good and decent man, matter-of-fact and serious: a professional man, doing his job. The elves are like the crowd at a political rally. A sequence involving a bag full of toys is seen from a high angle that dramatizes Santa’s operation but doesn’t romanticize it; this is not Jolly St. Nick, but Claus, Inc. There is indeed something a little scary about all those elves with their intense, angular faces and their mob mentality.

That’s the magic of The Polar Express: It doesn’t let us off the hook with the usual reassuring Santa and Christmas clichés. When a helicopter lifts the bag of toys over the town square, of course it knocks a star off the top of the Christmas tree, and of course an elf is almost skewered far below. When Santa’s helpers hitch up the reindeer, they look not like tame cartoon characters, but like skittish purebreds. And as for Lonely Boy, although he does make the trip and get his present, and is fiercely protective of it, at the end of the movie we suspect his troubles are not over, and that loneliness may be his condition.

There are so many jobs and so many credits on this movie that I don’t know who to praise, but there are sequences here that are really very special. Some are quiet little moments, like a reflection in a hubcap. Some are visual masterstrokes, like a point of view that looks straight up through a printed page, with the letters floating between us and the reader. Some are story concepts, like the train car filled with old and dead toys being taken back to the Pole for recycling. Some are elements of mystery, like the character of the hobo, who is helpful and even saves Hero Boy’s life but is in a world of his own up there on top of the train and doesn’t become anybody’s buddy (when he disappears, his hand always lingers a little longer than his body).

The Polar Express is a movie for more than one season; it will become a perennial, shared by the generations. It has a haunting magical quality because it has imagined its world freshly and played true to it, sidestepping all the tiresome Christmas clichés that children have inflicted on them this time of year. The conductor tells Hero Boy he thinks he really should get on the train, and I have the same advice for you.

Prancer

G, 102 m., 1989

Sam Elliott (John Riggs), Rebecca Harrell (Jessica Riggs), Cloris Leachman (Mrs. McFarland), Rutanya Alda (Aunt Sarah), John Joseph Duda (Steve Riggs), Abe Vigoda (Orel Benton), Boo (Prancer). Directed By John Hancock. Produced by Raffaella De Laurentiis. Screenplay by Greg Taylor.

Every once in a while you meet a kid like Jessica, who is tough and resilient and yet hangs onto her dreams.