The wolves are animals that appear in The Polar Express book and film.
The Polar Express[]
The wolves appear in the book in the forest when the train races through. Most of them, along with unseen rabbits, hide from the train while three can be seen watching it pass by.
In the film during the ticket journey, when Hero Girl's ticket lands on the ground, having been blown away by the wind the Hero Boy tried to return it to her, three of the wolves appear on-screen and are seen watching the Polar Express passing through the forest. The other wolves race by and the three of the animals ran with the rest of the pack. This causes the ticket to blow among the pack chasing after the train crossing over a nearby viaduct until the wolves came to the edge of the cliff. The wolves turn right in another direction and the ticket gets blown up in the air, before being taken by a flying eagle who brings it to it's chick.
Behind the scenes[]
The filmmakers wanted the illustration from the book with the wolves to be represented at some point in the film. Director Robert Zemeckis would come up with a sequence where Hero Boy loses Hero Girl's ticket to the wind and it goes through various situations before returning to the train.[1] When the wolves appear, the three that stop to watch the train strike the same pose as in the book.
Like Smokey and Steamer, the Scrooge puppet and other animals in the film, the wolves were keyframe-animated as animating them through motion-capture would have been impossible.[2] The animators often had to fix the wolves' animation as they would sometimes run into a tree or trip over a log or their movements would come out unappealing.[1]
Trivia[]
- In the CD-ROM Multimedia Edition, the left-most wolf walks off-screen.
- In real life, wolves tend to avoid railways as they do not run alongside trains and vehicles.
Gallery[]
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Schaub, David (November 15, 2005). "'The Polar Express Diary': Part 4 -- Keyframe Animation". Animation World Network.
- ↑ Schaub, David (November 23, 2004). "'The Polar Express' Diary: Part 1 -- Testing and Prepping". Animation World Network.