These additions are fairly consonant with the spirit of Van Allsburg’s work almost any two minutes of The Polar Express could be a scene in a Van Allsburg story, even if they could never all be squeezed into a single book. Van Allsburg’s simple story of a nameless, doubting boy who rides a magical train to Santa’s home at the North Pole is fleshed out by introducing us to a few of his young fellow passengers, and also by making the train ride and the visit to the North Pole far more eventful. The result still isn’t quite lifelike, not yet, but the visuals in The Polar Express somehow look like illustrations come to life, as the characters in the video-game-inspired Final Fantasy looked like computer-game avatars.

The Polar Express actually goes beyond Final Fantasy in its use of motion capture, a technique used for Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, in which real actors act out the characters’ movements, and countless tiny sensors on the actors’ bodies and faces record the movements and transfer them to digital synthespians.

Following in the footsteps of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, The Polar Express achieves a striking approximation of photorealism in its human characters, something that no other all-computer-animated feature film but these two has yet attempted.