OFF THE RAILS

REVIEWED - THE POLAR EXPRESS: When Pixar was making its first computer-animated feature, some pessimists predicted that the company's experiments would come to be viewed by future generations with the same bemusement we currently direct towards the 3-D movies of the 1950s. Of course, the triumphant Toy Story proved them all wrong, writes Donald Clarke

The unintentionally terrifying The Polar Express, which, like 2001's Final Fantasy, uses computers in the pursuit of an utterly pointless photo-realism, may not fair so well with film historians of the 2040s. Robert Zemeckis's film seems to take place in a version of our own universe where all living things have had their souls cruelly sucked out of them. I thought of little else but death all the way through.

There is, in fact, a morbid undercurrent to the story itself. As a little boy (voiced, like another five characters, by Tom Hanks) is trying to settle down to sleep on Christmas Eve, he is surprised to hear a train pull up outside his window. He is lured aboard by an authoritarian conductor - the Pied Piper? - and, along with a coach-load of similarly disoriented children, ferried northwards to eternal oblivion.

I exaggerate. The tykes are not, in fact, being led to their death, but to a North Pole closely modelled on the Nuremberg of Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi epic Triumph of the Will. Millions of elves parade through the town square with martial precision. An ill-tempered Santa struts about like well, given his girth, more like Mussolini than the other fellow. What will befall any child sufficiently independently minded to question the regime is not clear, but no elfin re-education camp could have a grimmer atmosphere than Santa's Kingdom.

There are great technical advances on display here. You'd expect little else after investing $165 million. But, even if Zemeckis had managed to produce a world that looked and felt exactly like our own, why, exactly, would that have been worth doing?