Tom Hanks lends his voice to six characters in Robert Zemeckis' Christmas fairytale The Polar Express. Unfortunately it's "thrown off the tracks by pointless detours", and performance capture animation that manages to make a trainload of children look like refugees from a George A Romero flick. It performed below expectations at the box office, taking $162m against an ambitious $150m budget.

All Aboard!

Mr Hanks reflects on the "ridiculously challenging" task of acting out multiple roles in You Look Familiar. On top of that he looks as if he's suffering from a strange tropical disease, romping about like a madman with dozens of pimple-like sensors attached to his face and body. It's only a fleeting insight into the process of performance capture, but there is more detail in A Genuine Ticket To Ride. This is an interactive featurette that breaks down the stages of performance and animation with Zemeckis explaining how he was able to move a virtual camera through a virtual world. Meanwhile executive producer Chris Van Allsburg, who authored the book on which the film is based, talks about his "cosy, industrialised" vision of the North Pole. Finally composers Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard chat about the big musical numbers like Hot Chocolate.

Five easy-to-find Easter eggs scattered across this two-disc edition offer a multi-angle look at key scenes (including the frenetic Hot Chocolate) to showcase the live action performances beneath the final animation.

Last Stop

Chris Van Allsburg flips through his family album and explains how he went from sculpting to sketching to big-budget moviemaking in the featurette True Aspirations. He reveals that the idea for The Polar Express was essentially "a recovered dream", while in Meet The Snow Angels, he explains, "My Christmas memories are snowy memories." The rest of the cast and crew share their reminiscences too with Hanks encapsulating the mood of the film when he says that getting presents "wasn't nearly as important as the night before".

Glen Ballard and Alan Silvestri pop up again to discuss the composition of the film's theme tune Believe, performed by Josh Groban in a separate featurette. There's also an additional song that comes accompanied with raw CG animation and features the late Michael Jeter as the all-singing, all-dancing Smokey and Steamer (the two-man engine room crew). Finally, kids can test their hand-eye coordination with The Polar Express Challenge, a set-top game that requires you to steer the train across a frozen lake. In a way it sums up this two-disc edition, which only just manages to keep its head above water.

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