Most people have heard of the movie The Polar Express. It’s based off a book with the same title written by Chris Van Allsburg. The movie was made in 2004, and it was directed by Robert Zemeckis. He made other films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the Back to the Future Trilogy, and A Christmas Carol.
The Polar Express is the story of when a boy took a train to the North Pole, and along the way he met many different people that helped him believe in the Christmas spirit, and Santa Claus. However, I believe that there is a deeper meaning in this movie, and that this movie is a retelling of A Christmas Carol.
Tom Hanks voices six of the characters: The adult hero-boy, his father, the Train Conductor, the Hobo, the Scrooge puppet, and Santa Claus himself.
I believe that because they are all voiced by Tom Hanks, they are the same person, and the entire movie is just Tom Hanks’s character attempting to believe in the Christmas spirit.
Let’s start with the train: The train in the movie took all the kids to the North Pole, but what it was literally was the hero-boy’s train of thought, to start having the Christmas spirit. Following the parallels of A Christmas Carol, The Conductor was the Ghost of Christmas Past.
He guided the boy through the train, showing him all the happy kids enjoying kids going to see Santa. And that train did not travel the world to pick up kids. All of them were living in the neighborhood of the boy, meaning that they were also just a “vision” for him to see. The train did stop after the boy got on, once. It picked up another boy, but he was a vision of Christmas Present. We’ll get back to that part later.
Eventually on the train, the Conductor takes the hero-boy on to the top of the train. Up there, he meets a hobo, who says he has been living on the train for a very long time. At some point the Hobo says that he “once owned the train,” the train that I said before was just a physical representation of his Train of Thought. This is another clue that all the characters played by Tom Hanks are the same person. The Hobo is the ghost of Christmas Future, and a vision of the hero-boy in the future.
The Hobo doesn’t believe in Santa, even though he has obviously traveled to and from the North Pole many times because he lives on top of the train. While he is the Christmas Future ghost, he is also the physical representation of disbelief the hero has. “Owning the train” means that the disbelief used to control the hero-boy, but he was starting to believe again.
When he returns home at the end of the film, the Hobo is seen on top of the train, before he turns to dust/snow and disappears, meaning that the hero-boy has started to believe again.
The final boy that the train picked up is a representation of The Ghost of Christmas Present. In A Christmas Carol, the ghost showed Scrooge the poor life of his employee, Bob Cratchit, and in The Polar Express, the boy’s life was also poor. He had one present, and lived in a small, old household.
He also seemed to not have received many Christmas presents in the past, because he was not excited to get on the train in the beginning, but super excited when he discovered that he actually had a present for him this year.
The hero-boy couldn’t see Santa until he started believing, and he was also able to hear the silver bell ring. There was a similar moment of revelation that Scrooge had in his story, when he woke up and treated everyone better. It was the refining moment for both of these characters, and it made them both change and enjoy Christmas.
Kristopher K. Online 