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Image credit: The Polar Express: Warner Bros.

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The Polar Express

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With Van Allsburg assured that this wouldn't be a Disney-style, 2-D 'toon, Warner pushed the start button for Hanks and Zemeckis to begin one of the most ambitious CG experiments since Toy Story — which tells you just how much clout the men who made Forrest Gump still carry.

It's April 2004, and Hanks, Nona Gaye, and some other actors are working out final pickup shots with Zemeckis. The bulk of principal photography — or is that capture-ography? — has been done for nearly a year. They're on a Warner-lot soundstage tricked out with huge blue screens but virtually no scenery or conventional lighting, nor any of the usual wardrobe racks. The actors' faces are festooned with little round reflective markers (''jewels,'' in performance-capture-ese) that make them look like refugees from a Hellraiser sequel. ''It's really creepy if you take a flash picture,'' says Zemeckis with adolescent glee. '''Cause they just light up.'' Occasionally, a marker pops off and crew members descend like EMS rescuers. ''We have a face marker down on Tom, number 147,'' frets a fixer into a walkie-talkie.

To avoid the vagaries of searching for the next Haley Joel Osment and the budget-ballooning hassles of work-schedule limits for child actors, Zemeckis is having all the main kids' roles played by adult performers. It's a kick to watch Hanks trot out his bag of Big tricks, impersonating an 8-year-old boy with happy abandon. Between takes, the star keeps up a playfully prickly dialogue with his director. ''Oh, you don't even need us,'' Hanks needles after one exacting bit of action. ''They'll just fix it later on.''

Meantime, across town at Sony Pictures Imageworks (hired by Warner on a contract basis), hundreds of technicians are transforming raw, moving-dot data into finished shots at batteries of dimly lit workstations. Are these worker bees buzzing toward a day when actors, more malleable than ever after the director calls ''Cut,'' get cut out altogether, in favor of CG technicians? No way, claims Zemeckis. ''It's like synthesized music,'' he argues. ''You still need the greatest musician to play the synthesizer, to give it that warm, human quality.''

Whatever the popular-appeal fate of The Polar Express, the impact of its technology will be enormous. Zemeckis is already at work exec-producing a second performance-capture project, Monster House, which he says should cost about half what Polar did thanks to all the research and development already accomplished. And because the CG visuals exist in a perfectly realized virtual space, it's comparatively easy to create 3-D versions of these films — something DreamWorks tried and failed to do with the original Shrek due to technical bugs that would've cost a fortune to fix. Nearly a year ago, Warner decided that a 3-D Polar Express would be a hell of an idea, and hastily commissioned the IMAX corporation to turn one out in time to debut on about 60 giant screens around the U.S. the same day regular prints unspool.

But it's the acting profession that stands to morph most radically in a post-Polar world. When performances exist as just a group of dots moving around in space, they're graftable onto other faces, other bodies. ''Don Rickles,'' says Tom Hanks, ''could play Abraham Lincoln. And Kevin Kline could play Don Rickles. Anybody can play anybody now, provided their interpretation of the role is the best that's out there. That's incredibly liberating.''

So here comes the future, you hockey pucks — provided this heavily freighted train makes it up the steep rails of Mount Box Office.