02:28 PM EST on Sunday, October 31, 2004

BY MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writer

PROVIDENCE -- Chris Van Allsburg lives in a big brick house on the East Side that looks very much like the White Rabbit's house in the Disney version of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland," right down to the hinged white garden gate out front.

That's fitting, because Van Allsburg has become renowned for more than a dozen illustrated children's books, including the perennially popular Christmas tale The Polar Express, which has been turned into a $165-million film by Tom Hanks and Warner Bros.

The movie has engendered a parade of people into his house, phone interviews and a trip to New York City last weekend "for four or five quick interviews between a presentation to a large group of education students at New York University and then another large group of teachers at Columbia."

Boston's Channel 5 is to come to his house the day after we chat; Channel 4 the day after that. And on Nov. 12, two days after the film opens on thousands of movie screens, he begins a cross-country book tour from San Francisco back to Providence, where he will sign books at the Borders store at Providence Place beginning at 7 p.m. Dec. 1 and the Brown University bookstore at 2 p.m. Dec. 5.

"So I will go to them," he says with a chuckle.

Inside the house, sun streams through big front windows as Van Allsburg sits cross-legged in the living room on a bulky, wood-framed sofa. An easygoing man with thinning gray hair and beard, he speaks in a gentle voice often punctuated by laughter.

The living room is a monument to whimsy. Knickknacks range from a 6-inch-tall red plastic Robby the Robot on an end table to Italian dolls perched on a piano, a 4-foot-tall model of a sailing ship on the hardwood floor, and a pair of antique traction engines on either side of the fireplace. Van Allsburg says the engines are precursors of the tractor, adding that they actually might work if filled with gasoline, but let's not try it.

The mantel is crowded with odd, clownish-looking 4-inch-tall ceramic pieces -- bald men with holes in their heads (to hold matchsticks for the fire, Van Allsburg offers). The big sofa and two armchairs that face each other opposite the fireplace give the room a rustic, mountain cabin feel.

Behind the armchairs on a table sits one of Van Allsburg's early sculptures, before he became famous for his drawings -- a 2-foot-tall spool-shaped base with hinged door and, on top, a coffee cup about to spill its brew, all in wood.

All this cuteness belies the storm that has been swirling around Van Allsburg for several weeks as Warner Bros. gears up for the release of The Polar Express. The Oscar-winning Hanks not only produced the film but plays five roles, including the hero boy, who clambers aboard a steam train on Christmas Eve that's headed to meet Santa Claus at the North Pole, and the train's conductor.

About a month ago Van Allsburg saw the screen version, which took his simple, spare story and added sometimes death-defying adventures that include a roller-coasterish ride on the train.

"The first time you see it," he says diplomatically, "you're looking at it in a judgmental way that prevents you from enjoying it in a way if you had no connection to it.

"I have to see it again because I did just see it that one time, and I was looking at it constantly as a judge. Is-this-good-is-this-bad-is-this-good-is-this-bad?" he says, rat-a-tat-tat. "You don't really have a chance to enjoy the film with a bucket of popcorn when you're looking at it like that.

"But separate from how I felt about The Polar Express, I don't have a very sympathetic response to authors who complain about a film made from their book, because you sort of know what you're getting into. The reality is, you can't protect or defend it once you've given it up.

"I've made peace with the fact that basically what I provided in the two films made from my books [the hit Jumanji starring Robin Williams was released in 1995] is a premise. They're fairly simple ideas. The premise is not all that complicated. So I'm not in any sense providing a blueprint to the filmmakers that they're obliged to follow.

"From my point of view, it's not that the filmmakers have an obligation to be as faithful as they can to the book, but to make as good a film as they can. And the ways that it varies from the book are fine. It's what filmmakers should do if they think it will give them a better film.

"I gave them license to do what they thought they needed to do to expand the story . . . and that included telling the story from the point of view of the North Pole or to describe the construction of the train or the backstory of the conductor. I said, 'Whatever you feel you need to do to create a frame around the essential story of the journey northward, that's fine with me.' "

Van Allsburg wasn't happy with the screen version of Jumanji, about a board game that magically brings African animals running amok in their small town, primarily because he'd written a screenplay that was eventually rejected. The film was turned into something emphasizing more action than he'd intended.

"But in the past 10 years I've seen a lot of kids' films, because my children are younger, and my opinion of it now is higher than when it came out. I've seen so many bad kids' films and, in the scheme of things, this is a pretty good one."

He had no preconceived notions of what Hanks, director Robert Zemeckis and writer William Broyles Jr. would do with The Polar Express, except that he felt it was in good hands with them.

Van Allsburg knew from meeting with Hanks in California, after the actor had sent his publisher a fax several years ago wondering if the film rights were still available, that "he didn't intend to take the story and incorporate all the cheesy conventions you see in kids' films -- oceans of irony and desperate attempts at gags. At some point the train would break down, the kids would all get on snowboards and put their hats on backwards and call each other 'Dude.' He didn't want to open it up in that way.

"What he imagined was pretty much the book, but told pretty elaborately and with a lot more action. It's a combination of action and sentiment."

He also liked that Zemeckis was going to film the movie with Hanks and the other actors in a motion-capture technique that would record their body and facial movements, later turning them into a sort of animated rendering in the computer. Van Allsburg had to approve this because "when I sold the film rights, I stipulated it couldn't be animation. I hadn't seen animation that encouraged me to think you could convey emotion through an animated character."

So Zemeckis made a test of the scene in which the magical train pulls up on Christmas Eve in front of the boy's house, waiting to carry him to the North Pole. "I saw a 10-second sequence of the boy leaping out of bed and running downstairs to confront the train. It's not the one that appears in the film, but I was impressed by it."

Van Allsburg is happy that the film version, despite its many elaborate additions, looks very much like his drawings, which have captivated a generation of readers both young and grownup. He praised Zemeckis, whose films include Forrest Gump with Hanks and the Back to the Future trilogy. "He believed that because the way the pictures looked had a lot to do with the strong feelings the book conveyed, it would be essential to make a film that looked like the book."

Although the movie's look is a form of animation, "the things I liked about it are the things you couldn't do with animation before. That doesn't include the wild roller-coaster ride, because that's something that actually was in the grasp of animation.

"One of the parts I liked was when the little kid who lives on the edge of town chooses not to get on the train. And then you can see the hero boy watching him change his mind. The boy looks back wondering what to do, because he's worried about the kid and he doesn't how to help him [as the train begins pulling away].

"It's mostly done with body movement and facial expressions. That's the kind of thing you never could have accomplished in animation -- a character's indecision -- because animation's not subtle."

Although Van Allsburg begins a tour for his Polar Express book and "my 14 other books" just two days after the screen version pulls into theaters, one wonders whether he will become overshadowed by the movie. Test screening numbers for the film have gone through the roof and the producers are expecting a smash hit. Will it, perhaps, go on to become Tom Hanks' Polar Express?

"If a film turns out really bad," says Van Allsburg, "it doesn't ordinarily damage the book.

"The only time the film overwhelms and obliterates the book version is when the film is absolutely terrific. More people now think of [director Victor] Fleming's screen version of The Wizard of Oz than [L. Frank] Baum's book," or even Fleming's version that same year of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. "Both good examples, because the films were so successful and so effective as film stories that they displaced the book versions."

So he worries that "possibly people would no longer gather around the Christmas tree to read the book, and would instead boot up the DVD, which will be available a year from now. That's the thing I find most depressing.

"I've heard so many stories about people who keep the book in a special box and won't let the kids take it out until Dec. 1 because they want to isolate it and make it part of the family celebration, and they read it every day from Dec. 1st to Dec. 25th. The possibility that families could replace reading the book with DVD watching, that's generally depressing."

Yet the book has survived for nearly two decades with 6 million copies in print, despite the fact that when he wrote it, "I didn't have any expectations that the audience would be as large as it turned out.

"All authors probably have little delusions while putting the finishing touches on their manuscript that this will change the world or this will be in print for a millennium, but I didn't entertain much of that."

So why has it been a such a long-running success?

"People like it," he answers with a shrug. "I think it's the combination of a fantasy, but also this bittersweet tale that reminds adults that at one point in their lives their parents went through great efforts to create the Theater of Christmas for them. And then they realize that they've done the same thing for their own children. But they see, as their children reach the age of 8 or 9, that they're leaving their childhood. That's a sentimental moment for a parent.

"And I think kids like it because it has a kind of mystery to it. It takes place at night and it's on a train, which feels like jeopardy to get on it."

His own life seems to be devoid of such jeopardy. Van Allsburg, 55, came to Providence three decades ago from his hometown of Grand Rapids, Mich., when he arrived at the Rhode Island School of Design for a graduate degree in sculpture. He and his wife, Lisa Morrison, stayed on, always living on the East Side.

When asked why he has stayed so long, he replies breezily, "My kids are in school and they they like their school." Daughter Sophia is 13; Anna is 9.

But now he has more pressing things to consider. He'll attend a premiere of The Polar Express in Grand Rapids Thursday, the New York City premiere Nov. 8. Immediately following that, he'll drive to Boston so he can be at a TV studio for a noon broadcast the next day to 97 Regal Theaters in the South where elementary school groups will see the film, followed by a closed-circuit question-and-answer session with him.

Following the broadcast, he has to return to Providence to prepare for the premiere at the Showcase Seekonk benefitting the CVS Pharmacy/Draw-A-Breath education program he founded with his wife in 1996 at Hasbro Children's Hospital.

It's an exhausting grind. "I can't get any of my own work done," Van Allsburg says.

But then he adds, "I suppose I should count my blessings, because I'm only in the position of having to do these things because I'm involved in a thing that is, essentially, a success.

"I've learned that there actually are authors who see this as the reward for their effort . . . to go out and experience adulation.

"But I just think, geez, I'd just love to hunker down in my studio and have a body double go out and get the adulation and come back and tell me about it."