Christmas In July: The Disconcerting Experience Of Watching ‘The Polar Express’ When It’s Sweltering Outside

I’m noticeably, uncomfortably sweaty when I sit down on my couch and fire up Hulu. It’s mid-July in New York City, and temperatures are in touching the high 80s. My window AC unit is too loud and expensive to run for me to keep it on for extended periods of time. It is, decidedly, a terrible time to watch a Christmas movie. And, yet, that’s what I’m doing, because the good folks at Hulu added the animated holiday flick The Polar Express to their streaming library at the start of the month, a cool 177 days before Christmas. Why shouldn’t I take advantage of this streaming offering, no matter how unseasonal?

Well, there are a lot of reasons.

It’s unclear exactly why Hulu thought July was a good time to add the 2004 animated Christmas movie to its library. No members of Hulu’s acquisitions team were made available to explain the specific rationale behind adding The Polar Express this far ahead of Christmas, but a rep for Hulu seemed to suggest that there wasn’t some larger angle at play (“I’m not entirely sure we have a Christmas in July strategy,” the rep said.)

Whether it was a boring licensing deal or just a matter of Christmas coming earlier every year, The Polar Express is now streaming, and it’s deeply disorienting experience watching it in the summer.

Part of this comes down to the movie itself, which is a trip even when you’re watching it at the right time of year. The film, Robert Zemeckis’ adaptation of the beloved Caldecott Medal-winning picture book by Chris Van Allsburg, is infamous for its animation style. A story which was initially told through delicate, painterly images on page was brought to life via motion-capture for the big screen. Tom Hanks covered himself in tiny balls and then animators copied his likeness, dropping his performance into a magical wintery world.

The result is profoundly upsetting; the Polar Express jumps its tracks instantly and plunges into the uncanny valley. In part due to deliberate artistic choices and in large part thanks to the technical limitations of the time, all the characters have dead eyes. The children, especially, are terrible little digital homunculi, as they’re so near-human that the little discrepancies are jarring. When the animation doesn’t look monstrous (Hanks’ conductor character looks more or less okay), it’s boring. Think of how the recently released Lion King remake is getting knocked for having no personality in it’s near-photorealistic animals compared the hand-drawn originals, and then imagine animating humans with technology from a decade and a half earlier and you’ll have The Polar Express.

The film’s visual level of wrongness matches the wrong feeling I have as the July sun begins to angle itself directly in front of my window, turning the living room into an over while my laptop’s battery begins to broil my thighs. Watching any Christmas movie in July would probably inspire a similar cognitive dissonance, but The Polar Express invites such confusion on its own.

At one point, Hanks previously stern conductor character becomes a song and dance showman, leading a host of waiters through a choreographed dance as they give the children on the train hot chocolate. The goofiness of the dancing feels at odds with the attempted realism of the animation, and the thought of drinking hot chocolate at this time of year, at this temperature, makes me want to die.

The goofiness of the dancing feels at odds with the attempted realism of the animation, and the thought of drinking hot chocolate at this time of year, at this temperature, makes me want to die.

The original book is slight, as there’s really not much conflict or action as the titular train makes its way to the North Pole and back. The film invents some to pad out the runtime, but it feels like padding. The highlights of this effort to turn a short book into a feature-length visual effort include an elaborate scene that follows a ticket as it’s blown by a Christmas wind through a cool snowy night. As there are no motion-capture humans in this sequence, it’s a highlight, but the wintery wonderland on display feels irrelevant both to the plot of the movie and anything in real life, since it is, again, 88 degrees in July.

I’m 28 and childless, so I’m clearly not the target audience for The Polar Express and its message about believing in Santa Claus. Still, I can’t just chalk up my perplexed, borderline grinch-like reaction to the film just to a lack of youthful vigor and Christmas spirit. I’d argue that there is no target audience for The Polar Express in the middle of the summer, which makes Hulu’s decision to stream it only slightly less baffling than my decision to watch it for the content.

The Polar Express is not what I would call a Christmas classic, but almost a full 6 months away from the time when you’d actually want to watch it, the movie doesn’t have a chance of holding up. Summer is no time for Christmas movies — unless you live in the Southern Hemisphere.

Am I just accidentally having an Australian Christmas experience?

“I think that’s 100 percent exactly what it’s like for Aussies who would watch movies about snow,” says Amber, my Australian friend who has lived in New York for years, when I ask her how my experience stacks up. Australia doesn’t have a big film industry, so Christmas movies are typically imported from countries where December is the start of winter, not summer.

“Australians still try to do the ‘cold things,’ even though they don’t make sense there,” she adds. “People have big roast dinners and all the Christmas wrapping is all snowflakes and sleighs and stuff that we do not have. I’m glad that you got to feel that weird contrast.”

That “weird contrast” may be the norm Down Under, but I can’t say I’d recommend the experience to anyone looking for a movie to watch in the summer. Assuming Hulu doesn’t inexplicably remove The Polar Express from its library by Christmas time, stream it while wrapped in a blanket, enjoying the smell of roasted chestnuts. Right now, stream a summer blockbuster you missed, or maybe go to the beach.

“Obviously, cold weather just lends itself to Christmas movie-watching a lot more,” Amber tells me. “I feel like you sort of fucked up watching it in the summer, because this is when you should not be inside.”

James Grebey is a pop culture journalist who writes for Syfy Wire, GQ, Billboard, Rotten Tomatoes, The Columbia Journalism Review, and more. Find more of his work at those places, or check out his dump photoshop jokes on Twitter.

Where to stream The Polar Express