The Polar Express: a controversial Christmas film

The Polar Express (2004) is a film about some children who take a ride on a magical train to the North Pole to visit Santa Claus and his elves.

It was the first film I ever saw in an IMAX cinema. I went to the drum-shaped BFI one at Waterloo, which has the biggest screen in Britain. This was my Christmas treat for 2004.

I think that this was the first time I ever saw  'uncanny valley' CGI characters too, so there were three new experiences in one outing.

The snowy landscapes in The Polar Express were beautiful, but the film as a whole was rather eerie; it had a weird and dreamlike atmosphere that made me feel uneasy. I did not like the hybrid animated/human characters either: they gave me the uncomfortable, something isn't right, feelings that some robotic people in this world do, people who seem neither dead nor fully alive, people who seem more like ghosts or zombies than real people.

The film was in 3-D; the roller-coaster swoops of the camera made me dizzy!

The friend who came to see the film with me had much the same opinion of it: the IMAX experience was great apart from the times when we had to close our eyes because the vertical drops made us feel seasick, but parts of the film were rather disturbing.

With hindsight, even the 'normal' scenes in The Polar Express, children in their homes for example, seem like fantasy; they look like an alternate version of reality similar to the one in the film Coraline (2009). 

Stella Gibbons’s My American and writing: Part III

There comes a time when Amy Lee changes direction: she stops producing tales of heroism and adventure and joins the school of domestic realism. 

The  reasons given for this drastic transformation are rather contrived and not altogether convincing. I suspect that this element was introduced mainly for the sake of the plot and to make some points; Stella Gibbons could also have used it to clear up some unfinished business of her own .

From danger and death to domesticity

As a child Amy Lee scribbles non-stop, producing exciting adventure stories such as Pharaoh’s Curse: A Tale of  Ancient Egypt and The Wolf of Leningrad: A Thrilling Story of The Russian Revolution purely for her own enjoyment. The books she reads fire her imagination and provide the ideas for her stories.

As a young woman, she writes exciting adventure stories for publication.  She may not have any first-hand knowledge, any personal experience, of the sort of people and action that she writes about, but her readers love her work. She becomes a best-seller; her books are made into films and this gains her world-wide popularity.

After moving to America, Amy Lee changes track and writes a very different kind of story for a whole new constituency of readers:

“Her stories of family life communicated (because she herself felt it) to the passing of an examination or the breaking of a betrothal the excitement she had once given to escapes from death and last-minute rescues, and she charmed her readers by showing them the variety and interest of every day.”

So what happened here? Why did Amy abandon her heroic avatars? Why the farewell to adventure in favour of embracing mundane subject matters? One of the reasons given is that Amy's adventure stories lack moral values; they are in some ways unethical, unedifying and unwholesome, something that she is unaware of until she visits America and comes in for some direct criticism. She also cools off after experiencing danger, death amd great fear at first hand.

John Christopher’s Guardians: Part IV

One criticism I have of The Guardians is that it ends just when the most interesting and exciting part of the story is about to start. Perhaps John Christopher was intending to write a sequel but never got around to it!

I also find the final part of the story and the ending disappointing and unsatisfactory. What we get seems just an outline or a summary when compared with the early chapters. 

There is a lack of balance and consistency of approach in that while it takes two thirds of the book just to get the young hero Rob Randall out of his old life in the Conurb of London and into his new school in the County, some of the most crucial developments in the story are covered in just the last few pages. Perhaps there was a mad rush to beat a deadline or there was a problem with exceeding an agreed word count.

The detailed description of’ Rob’s escape from the awful boarding school and journey to the County is not balanced with equally detailed accounts of his subsequent experiences up to the point where he learns something terrible about how the Guardians of the County deal with dissidents. 

The Guardians 

After the revolt has been put down, a patrol of Guardians comes to the house looking for Mike. Even though the Giffords insist that Rob knows nothing and was not involved in the uprising, they take him away for questioning.

He is ‘interviewed’ by Sir Percy Gregory, the Lord Lieutenant of the County. Sir Percy reveals that he has known all along that Rob is an imposter:

“You can, of course, no longer be treated as an ordinary member of our society. You are not one, after all. You are a Conurban, posing as County. You are listed by the Conurb police as a runaway from the boarding school at Barnes. So I don't mind telling you that this society is not so haphazard and unorganized as it seems. Things are investigated and checked: thoroughly. We had the boy from Nepal and the absentee from the boarding school matched within twenty-four hours of the first automatic query.”

Rob realises that it is useless to say that he knows nothing at all about the plot. He tells Sir Percy everything he knows about the dissident schoolboys, but he doesn’t mention Mike’s recent visit to the Gifford home.

John Christopher’s Guardians: Part III

Rob Randall learns to cope quite well with life at his new school, but then some unexpected problems arise in the form of his friend and schoolmate Mike Gifford's attempts to recruit him into a revolutionary group. 

Changing places

Rob's arrival in the County is responsible for a big change in Mike's attitude towards the Conurbs and their inhabitants.  Up to this point his view of the other side has always been the typical aristocratic one of denigration and dismissal:

“Like everyone else in the County he knew a little about the Conurb: enough to be contemptuous of it. It was the place of the mob, where people dashed around in electrocars, crowded together like sardines, listened to raucous pop music, watched holovision and the bloodthirsty Games - for the most part watched the Games on holovision. 

It was the place where everyone ate processed foods and liked them, where there were riots and civil disturbances, where no one knew how to behave properly, how to dress or exchange courtesies, how to speak English even. It was the place one knew existed and, apart from thanking God one did not have to live there, preferred to forget.”

Rob's personality and his achievements in his new life cause Mike to revise his opinions and think along different lines. He asks Rob many questions about his earlier life, the people he knew and the Conurbs. He sounds Rob out on the subject of possible changes in the relationship between the Conurbs and the County. Rob sees nothing wrong with the existing system that keeps them divided, and even if there were areas for improvement he thinks that no one could do anything about it. Even if something could be done, would the County want hordes of Conurbans pouring in and ruining everything? 

Stella Gibbons’s My American and writing: Part I

As previously mentioned, Stella Gibbons makes some insightful comments about writers, writing and the imagination in her novel My American, in which Amy Lee is the main character. Amy's love of reading, writing and research and her need for solitude as a young girl are all very typical of people who grow up to be writers. 

This article contains some particularly significant extracts with the commentary they inspire:

Freely flowing words and ideas

What Stella Gibbons says about Amy's writing is a good description of what it feels like when the ideas and words come easily:

“Her stories never stuck, but sometimes she enjoyed writing them more than she did at other times. When the pen flew and her hand ached, when there was nothing real in the world except the white paper before her and the flying tip of the nib, and the picture in her mind that she was describing turned so quickly into words that she could no longer tell at what instant the figures in it became marks on the paper—then the story was Beginning to Run, and unfortunate is the writer who has never tasted such a moment.”

Unfortunate indeed is the writer whose creations are never fluent and painless - or frictionless as Rudyard Kipling would say.

And yes, the whole outer world often does disappear for some people when they are engrossed in reading or writing.

More freely flowing words and ideas

After getting a job as an office girl, Amy is sent to collect some copy from a very famous writer who has produced many stories for the boys’ magazine she works for.

John Christopher’s Guardians: Part II

Just like Elizabeth Goudge’s Linnets and Valerians, John Christopher’s Guardians is a slender little children’s paperback that at first sight might just possibly have enough material to inspire a paragraph or two of commentary. I found however that the more times I went through these books, the more material of interest I noticed and the more articles I needed to produce in order to cover it.

I investigated the Linnets book because I learned that it had a witch in it; working on the Borribles article reminded me of the Guardians book, which I first read ages ago just for the story. This time around, it is the issues and connections that are the main objects of interest.

In addition to the connections mentioned in Part I, The Guardians has some scenes and elements that remind me very much of Robert A. Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy.  Before going into this and some further connections, there is more of Rob Randall’s story to be told.

Rob arrives in the County
Rob Randall, the young orphaned Conurban hero of The Guardians, runs away from his hated boarding school to a place that he sees as his only option i.e. the County. 

He may have planned his escape and journey to the County carefully, but he has not thought much about what he will do when he gets there. 

Conurbans are like Borribles in that they prefer crowded streets to empty fields! Rob has not thought about the effect that the wide open spaces will have on him:

“Rob found himself shivering, not just with cold but at the sight of darkness, the thought of the emptiness beyond. All his life, like everyone else in the Conurbs, he had been surrounded by the comforting presence of others - all the millions of them. Being glad to have a little privacy occasionally was not the same as wanting to go out there, alone.”

However, Rob is tough and adaptable and he is interested in new experiences:

“Two rabbits appeared from the wood and he watched them, fascinated. It was hard to believe he was really here, in the County, with plants budding, wild things living all around him. And yet already this was the reality, the Conurb  - with its packed streets, high-rise buildings, crawling electrocars - the fantasy.”

John Christopher’s Guardians: Part I

The Guardians by John Christopher is a dystopian science fiction novel that was first published in 1970. Just like Michael de Larrabeiti’s Borribles trilogy, it was written for children and teenagers. 

The Guardians has nothing like the number of characters and adventures that can be found in the Borrible books, but this little story has an issue in common with them. 

The Guardians is a book of interest because of the character of the young hero Rob Randall and the question of which is the better of the two very different and complementary lifestyles it describes. It also contains some material that reminds me of other books mentioned on here.

The two worlds of The Guardians
The Guardians is set in England in the year 2052. England is divided into two distinct societies, the Conurbs and the County.

The Conurbs are highly-populated towns where modern technology is much in evidence. The majority of English people live in Conurbs. They are mainly workers. There are occasional riots, but the people are mostly kept quiet with entertainment in the form of carnivals and arena games that appeal to the bloodthirsty - bread and circuses with holovision.

The County is the sparsely-populated countryside, the home of the aristocratic minority. They are mainly people of independent means. They prefer not to use much technology; they have horses for transport. Their lifestyle is rather like that of Edwardian gentry at the height of the British Empire.

Huge fences keep the two societies separate physically, and a carefully controlled, conditioned and manipulated mutual 'us and them' mentality keeps them apart psychologically.

Something about Rob Randall
The story opens in a public library - this is an encouraging start!

The library is in the Conurb of London. Unfortunately it is dilapidated, decaying and well past its prime. People have become less individual, less inquiring and have mostly stopped reading books. Rob Randall, who likes solitude and has a love of reading, is the only person under fifty who goes there. He likes stories filled with excitement and adventures.

Rob’s mother, who was born in the County and who encouraged him to use the library, is dead; his father, who is an electrician, is killed in a work accident early on in the book. Rob is then sent by the authorities to a horrible state boarding school where the food is awful and he is given a very hard time by the masters, the prefects and the other boys.