Robert Zemeckis has never been a director content to rest on his laurels. After revolutionizing visual effects with films like Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and after winning Best Director for Forrest Gump, you’d think he might have settled into a comfortable groove of crowd-pleasers. Instead, he decided to pioneer a new frontier in filmmaking that would simultaneously advance cinema technology and give children nightmares for years to come.

Welcome to the uncanny valley, folks.

For those unfamiliar with the term, the uncanny valley is a concept from robotics that describes the unsettling feeling we get when something looks almost, but not quite, human. Picture a wax figure at Madame Tussauds that’s just realistic enough to make you uncomfortable, or Mark Zuckerberg trying to convince Congress he’s definitely a real person. It’s that sweet spot of “too real to be fake, too fake to be real” that makes our primitive brains scream “SOMETHING IS WRONG HERE.”

In 2004, Zemeckis decided this was exactly where he wanted to plant his creative flag with The Polar Express.

All Aboard the Nightmare Express

The Polar Express was groundbreaking. Let’s establish that right up front. This was the first feature film to be entirely created using motion capture technology, where actors’ movements are recorded digitally and then used to animate computer-generated characters. Tom Hanks, in a feat of either artistic dedication or contractual obligation, played six different roles, including a child (with the voice later dubbed by Daryl Sabara, because even technology has its limits).

The film cost a record-breaking $165-170 million, making it the most expensive animated feature at the time. Warner Bros. executives were reportedly nervous about whether audiences would accept this new technology. They should have been nervous about whether audiences would sleep again.

Here’s the thing about The Polar Express: it’s simultaneously a technical marvel and a masterclass in how to make human beings look like possessed mannequins. The characters’ eyes have all the warmth and life of a taxidermied deer. Their skin has the texture of fondant on a wedding cake that’s been left out in the sun. When they smile, it’s with the mechanical precision of a ventriloquist’s dummy that’s gained sentience and is plotting revenge.

The New York Times, in a moment of optimism that now seems quaint, wrote that the film “could mark a turning point in the gradual transition from an analog to a digital cinema.” They were right, but perhaps not in the way they intended. It marked a turning point where we all collectively realized that just because you can motion-capture Tom Hanks and turn him into a CGI train conductor doesn’t mean you should.

Critics were divided. Roger Ebert gave it four stars and praised its “haunting, magical quality.” (The key word there being “haunting.”) Meanwhile, CNN’s Paul Clinton called it “at best disconcerting, and at worst, a wee bit horrifying.” Geoff Pevere of the Toronto Star cut right to the chase: “If I were a child, I’d have nightmares. Come to think of it, I did anyway.”

The film’s reception perfectly captured the duality of Zemeckis’s achievement. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian criticized the technology, saying, “The hi-tech sheen is impressive but in an unexciting way. I wanted to see real human faces convey real human emotions.” But here’s the kicker – the film made $318.2 million worldwide and spawned countless real-world Polar Express train experiences. Apparently, people love being creeped out during the holidays.

Doubling Down on Digital Dickens

You’d think after the mixed reception and widespread “dear God, what have we done to children’s entertainment” response to The Polar Express, Zemeckis might have reconsidered his approach. He did not.

Instead, he looked at the uncanny valley, grabbed a shovel, and decided to dig deeper.

Enter 2009’s A Christmas Carol, where Jim Carrey would play not just one character, not six like Hanks, but Ebenezer Scrooge at multiple ages AND all three Christmas ghosts. Because if there’s one thing scarier than dead-eyed CGI Tom Hanks, it’s multiple dead-eyed CGI Jim Carreys haunting you across time and space.

By this point, Zemeckis had founded ImageMovers Digital with Disney, a company devoted entirely to creating 3D motion-capture films. The technology had evolved in the five years since The Polar Express. The budget had grown too – reaching $175-200 million. Surely, they reasoned, this would be the film to prove that motion capture could create believable human characters.

It wasn’t.

The film opened at #1, which sounds impressive until you realize it ultimately lost Disney an estimated $50-100 million and caused the president of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Group to resign. That’s not typically what happens when you nail it.

Critics were even less kind this time around. The film sits at 52% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the consensus reading that its “dazzling special effects distract from an array of fine performances from Jim Carrey and Gary Oldman.” Notice how they phrase that – the effects “distract from” the performances, as if the technology meant to showcase the acting actually obscured it.

Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon.com delivered perhaps the most damning assessment: the film “is a triumph of something—but it’s certainly not the Christmas spirit.” When your Christmas movie fails at Christmas spirit, you’ve got problems that go deeper than the uncanny valley.

The Evolution That Wasn’t

What’s fascinating about comparing these two films is how little the fundamental problem improved despite five years of technological advancement. Yes, A Christmas Carol had more detailed textures, more complex lighting, more sophisticated motion capture. But it still couldn’t solve the core issue: human beings are really, really good at recognizing other human beings, and we’re even better at recognizing when something is pretending to be human but isn’t quite pulling it off.

The characters in A Christmas Carol might have had more polygons than those in The Polar Express, but they still moved with that slightly-too-fluid quality that screams “digital puppet.” Their faces still had that waxy sheen that makes them look like they’re about to ask if you’ve accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior while standing unnaturally close to you at a bus stop.

This is particularly tragic given the source material. Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is one of the most adapted stories in Western literature precisely because it’s so human. It’s about redemption, compassion, and the transformation of a man’s soul. These themes require emotional depth and nuance – exactly what motion capture technology circa 2009 couldn’t deliver. You can’t explore the depths of human nature when your humans look like they escaped from a Victorian-era video game cutscene.

The Paradise of Paradoxes

There’s something beautifully ironic about using cutting-edge technology to adapt century-old stories about the importance of human connection. Both films are, at their heart, about belief and wonder – The Polar Express asks us to believe in Santa, while A Christmas Carol asks us to believe in redemption. Yet the very technology used to tell these stories creates a barrier to that belief.

Zemeckis himself seemed aware of this paradox. He once said about The Polar Express that he wanted to preserve the art style of the original book because it was “so much a part of the emotion of the story.” But in trying to create a new art style that bridged animation and live-action, he created something that lived in neither world comfortably.

It’s worth noting that both films were also released in 3D, adding another layer of technology between the audience and the story. As if the uncanny valley wasn’t deep enough, Zemeckis decided to make it three-dimensional. Parents across America had to decide whether it was worth paying extra for their children to be traumatized in IMAX.

The Legacy of the Valley

Here’s the thing: despite their creepiness factor (or perhaps because of it), both films have found their place in popular culture. The Polar Express has become something of a holiday tradition for many families, though whether they watch it earnestly or ironically is up for debate. It’s achieved meme status, with the “Hot Chocolate” scene becoming particularly infamous for its aggressive enthusiasm and dead-eyed children moving in perfect, terrifying synchronization.

A Christmas Carol, meanwhile, effectively killed ImageMovers Digital. Disney shut down the studio in 2010, with their final film, Mars Needs Moms, becoming one of the biggest box office bombs in history. Zemeckis returned to live-action filmmaking with 2012’s Flight, and audiences everywhere breathed a sigh of relief that Denzel Washington would remain flesh and blood.

The films also serve as a cautionary tale about the difference between “can” and “should” in filmmaking. Just because technology allows us to do something doesn’t mean it serves the story. Pixar was making films with fully computer-animated characters during this same period – The Incredibles came out the same year as The Polar Express – but they understood that stylized characters could convey more genuine emotion than pseudo-realistic ones.

Conclusion: The Valley Remains

In 2018, Zemeckis returned to motion capture with Welcome to Marwen, proving that some directors never learn. Or perhaps he’s playing the long game, waiting for technology to finally catch up to his vision. Maybe someday we’ll have motion capture so sophisticated that it perfectly replicates human emotion and movement. But by then, we’ll probably just be using actual humans again because, you know, they’re right there.

The journey of The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol represents a unique moment in cinema history – a time when ambition outpaced ability, when innovation became its own end rather than a means to better storytelling. They’re films that tried so hard to show us the future that they forgot to be present.

Were they failures? Financially, one yes, one no. Critically, mostly. Technologically, they were stepping stones to better things. But as nightmare fuel that makes you question the nature of humanity itself? Absolute successes.

So next Christmas, if you’re looking for something to watch with the family, maybe consider these films. Just keep the lights on. And maybe have some regular, non-CGI humans nearby for comfort. Because in Zemeckis’s uncanny valley, no one can hear you scream – they’re too distracted by the soulless eyes of CGI Tom Hanks wishing them a very merry Christmas.

What do you think? Are these films misunderstood masterpieces of technical innovation, or cautionary tales about the limits of technology in storytelling? Have you braved watching either of them recently, or are they permanently on your “never again” list? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!