What do you think of the movie "The polar express"?

I liked it. I think they did a pretty good job adapting it from the book.

I enjoyed it when I saw it.

I think the animators in that movie fought a battle with the uncanny valley and lost. I could not watch, it creeped me out. On the other hand, the book The Polar Express is wonderful. When I got rid of all my storybooks for young children, that is one of the few I held on to.

I completely agree with @SuperMouse. That is such a good way of putting the not quite definable creepiness of the movie.

Chris Van Allsburg is a wonderful author and his illustrations are truly magical. I’d rather read the book to a child than watch the film again.

But thank you @Sunshine1245 for mentioning it. Now I know what books to get for the littles in the family.

I love the book, but thought the movie was overrated.

Another vote for creepy.

So. Mother-f*cking. Creepy. I couldn’t watch anything besides the previews, and even those were pushing it. I don’t care if that thing is freaking Shakespeare, if it’s in the uncanny valley, I can’t look.

It’s wasn’t animated, it was motion-captured. And tranfering realife movement to CG characters has a tendency to produce a sense of something being not quite right. Animators don’t think well of it for the most part. Pixar the disclaimer “100% Motion Capture Free!” at the end of Ratatouille so you know how they feel about it.

I can’t really comment on the movie. I loathe hyper-realistic completely CGI movies so I don’t watch them. Consequently it’s been a while since I’ve seen anything directed by Zemekis. Ugh. The closer animation comes to reproducing reality the more disconcerting the .00005% of that doesn’t work. That and reality already exists, it’s just silly to try remaking it from scratch just the way it already is.

@fundevogel They’ve actually created the first animation that gets past the dip in the uncanny valley. She’s not quite all the way to the top yet, but she is past the corpse/zombie part at the bottom.

@papayalily What movie is that?

@Sunshine1245 for your reference, the uncanny valley

@fundevogel Not a movie. Read about it here and for the video (it’s no longer in the article) click here.

@papayalily Ah, that’s good news for FX, though I still balk at the idea of generating the entirety of a photo-real movie in the computer. That’s just hubris.

It looks like Image Metrics just comped their cgi face on top of their source footage. Which I approve of. No need to recreate the whole body if A. they already have it and B. the object is to reproduce facial animation.

I’ve not seen it, aside from short clips. I’ve heard a lot of people talking about the uncanny valley-ness of it and I have to agree, from the short bits I’ve seen.

A good clip explaining the uncanny valley that uses the Polar Express as one example is here