NEW YORK, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- Actor Tom Hanks says he wanted to lend his voice to characters in the animated film "Polar Express" because he always loved the story.
"The book itself, the 29 pages of it, is a haunting, very effective story, and you really can't quite put your finger on it," Hanks recently told reporters in New York.
The two-time Oscar winner said he has read the beautifully illustrated picture book about a boy's Christmas Eve trip to the North Pole to his own children since it was published in 1985.
"And as you get closer and closer to Christmas, you read it more and more," Hanks said. "There's something very stunning, quite frankly, about Chris Van Allsburg's paintings. They're not drawings. They're impressionistic versions of this child's house and what it was like to be on a train and all the aspects of the adventure that they go on."
