So my daughter is becoming addicted to Polar Express, so I’ve watched it about 5 times in the last week or so. What an amazing film! Sure, the story is fantastic and has a great message, but what really impresses me is the computer animation. I remember watching Monsters, Inc and being impressed, but it’s different when they try to model human faces and the complex expressions. Monsters, Inc was almost all cartoon style characters rather than human bodies and faces.
I’ve got a buddy who is really getting into 3D animation and he just marvels at the complexity of developing the models for just one scene. It’s good they have some incredibly powerful computers to handle the rendering. In fact, Post Magazine has this to say about the required computer resources: