Trailer
Plot summary
Late on Christmas Eve in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a boy stays awake listening for the bells of Santa's sleigh. Instead he hears a steam engine's roar, the Polar Express halted outside his house. The Conductor invites him aboard, and he joins other pajama-clad children in the passenger car. The train stops again for Billy, a lonely boy who otherwise would have been left behind, and Billy sits by himself in the observation car. Hot chocolate is served, and the girl takes a cup back to him. The boy notices that her ticket is unstamped and tries to return it as the train heads north.
Cast
- Brendan Kingas Pastry Chef
- Andy Pellickas Pastry Chef
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Polar Express (2004)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Robert Zemeckis rejected a live-action version of the story, estimating it would look terrible and cost around a billion dollars instead of the roughly 160 million the finished film cost, which pushed the production toward its performance-capture technique instead.
- The motion-capture process cost roughly a million dollars per minute of footage, and after Universal Studios passed on funding it, investor Steve Bing agreed to cover half the budget through his company Shangri-La Entertainment, which at that point had produced only one other film.
- The film's budget of $165 to 170 million was a record for an animated feature at the time of its release.
- Actor Michael Jeter died on March 30, 2003, before finishing recording his lines as the train's engineer and fireman, making this his last film performance; André Sogliuzzo was then brought in to record the remaining dialogue and re-dub most of what Jeter had already recorded.
- With a $71 million total, The Polar Express held the record for the highest IMAX gross of any film until Avatar took it five years later, in 2009.
- Having sold 724,000 copies and been certified Gold, the film's soundtrack became the best-selling film soundtrack and holiday album hybrid since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking music sales in 1991.
