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'The Polar Express' is a wonderful journey

Christmas, unfortunately, is a holiday for the young.

Just look at yourself now. Heading into adulthood, the Christmas season is less a time for magic and more a time to figure out how to best spend your money.

There is no Santa Claus. There never was.

Every year, it gets more difficult to remember the times when you could hardly fall asleep on Christmas Eve, pinching your eyes shut only to wake a few hours later and check downstairs. Maybe the big guy had already come. Maybe not. Either way, it was the most mysterious and wonderful night of the year.

However, age has a way of making you forget those feelings.

That said, the new film "The Polar Express" had a peculiar effect on me. I'm not the type to cry at a movie, but admittedly, a silent tear was parked in the corner of my eye the entire time. This is a wonderful film. Absolutely wonderful.

Director Robert Zemeckis, who once thrilled us with the "Back to the Future" trilogy, has created another effective time machine. This one, without the benefit of sophisticated gadgetry, can take you back 15, 25 or 40 years, back to a time when you still believed and did so with no guile.

In truth, there is some gadgetry. Rendered through a complicated motion-capture process, "The Polar Express" is a technical feast for the eyes, but it's not done out of the need for a marketing gimmick. The images onscreen are haunting echoes of the illustrations featured in Chris Van Allsburg's original children's book, not afraid to delve into shadowy corners and dark passageways, and they create a mood that is both bleak and magical.

The story itself is a simple piece of work, featuring characters without names on a very simple journey. Hero Boy, as he has been dubbed, is a young boy who is growing out of Christmas. He no longer believes. Therefore, he is all the more shocked when a train shows up on Christmas Eve with a conductor (Tom Hanks) offering to whisk him off to the North Pole.

Hero Boy steps on the platform after some initial hesitation, and he soon meets Hero Girl (Nona Gaye, the daughter of Marvin), the nerdy Know-It-All (Eddie Deezen) and Lonely Boy (Peter Scolari), whose poor family has never been able to give him a real Christmas.

On the way to the North Pole, they encounter several adventures, including a tense scene as the train travel across some thin ice and some breathtaking roller coaster-like scenes.

Once they arrive, they see the magic of Christmas first-hand, and Hero Boy begins to see he was wrong. There is something to believe in, and he has seen it with his own eyes.

"The Polar Express" is marvelous. Visually entrancing and emotionally powerful, it is one of those few holiday films that will inevitably outlive its particular era. If it weren't for a few flaws, such as the annoying sense of weightlessness that often overtakes CGI characters in films, it would be perfect.

But those few moments aside, "The Polar Express" is an incredible ride that serves as a reminder. It reminds us that Christmas can still be magical. It reminds us that Christmas can still be fun. Perhaps more than anything else, it reminds us that we can all still be children at heart. All we have to do is believe.

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