According to the animation supervisor in this incredibly detailed and context-filled production diary:
>Jeter would be playing an eight-foot tall character and a four-foot character. Due to the huge size discrepancy, it was impractical and ineffective to retarget motion data to those proportions. The dynamics and physicality simply did not translate in a believable way. Since these characters were such caricatures to begin with, we thought that keyframe animation would be the best approach.
I think this probably explains why this section of the movie works so much better than the rest. Reading these diaries gave me much more respect for Polar Express and what it pulled off. Not unlike the Star Wars prequels, or Ang Lee's HFR experiments Zemeckis was doing something so bleeding edge that despite an insane amount of thoughtful innovation and invention the end result just doesn't work.
Listening to the Polar Express episode, and the Michael Jeter conversation made me think of his performance in Fisher King. That's where I first saw him, and gosh that performance is just a delight. "That's OK for some people who don't have VCRs" kills me every time.
Spoilers ahead
JC. Talk about pulling out a win when you desperately needed one. The man sucks at comps all season and then finally when it was literally win or go home he clutches out a victory. Put his name in the record books folks.
Man.... I miss watching Jeter stepping up to the plate...
