Warner Bros.' big-budget movie for children, "The Polar Express," pulled into theaters Wednesday with a load of mixed reviews, ranging from praise for an instant holiday classic to jeers for a huge disappointment.
The computer-animated movie, which reportedly cost about $270 million to make and market, is a major financial risk for the studio and a creative risk for the new "performance capture" technology used to make it.
Whether the film could be headed for box office success won't be known until this Sunday's weekend box office estimate and then whether it does well during the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. As for the quality of the film's story and animation, film critics were divided.
Influential Chicago Sun Times critic Roger Ebert, said the movie "has the quality of a lot of lasting children's entertainment." But New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis called it "a grave and disappointing failure, as much of imagination as of technology."
The Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan called it "something of a devil's bargain." He praised the visual recreations of Chris Van Allsburg's book from which the movie was made, but knocks "scenes of indifferent slapstick and unnecessary spookiness."
In the movie, a young boy questions his belief in Santa Claus until he is magically transported to the North Pole aboard the Polar Express train to meet him.
The movie's plot worked for many critics.
"To not adore it is to feel like a scrooge," the Washington Post said. The Hollywood Reporter called it "a runaway thrill when the train cascades, roller coaster-like through cavernous peaks."
The animation in several scenes drew praise, especially one in which a young girl loses her train ticket and it swirls through the air over a lush, snow-covered landscape.
But the computer-generated characters, which director Robert Zemeckis based on tracking the movements of real-life actors, drew mostly negative comments.
The movie "may succeed ... replicating human movement ... but it fails to capture the subtlety of facial expressions or to fabricate sympathetic, evocative figures," said Daily Variety, a newspaper that covers the entertainment industry.
Zemeckis has said the humans were not meant to look real, but were supposed to recreate the book's illustrations.
"We had no intention of doing anything photo real," he said at a demonstration of the technology. "Photo real" is a term to describe digital characters designed to look authentic.
Warner Bros. is a unit of media conglomerate Time Warner Inc.
