Movie to Get Children into Christmas Mood

Rating: 7/10 (18 July 2006)

The Polar Express is about a boy who doubts Santa Clause. This doubter finds a train one night that is going to the North Pole. When this boy gets on the train he falls upon one problem after another. Without giving away too much about the story, in the end the experience teaches the boy to believe in Santa Clause. A parent who wants to indoctrinate his children into Christmas and Santa Clause can try to use this film as a tool to do just that.
Visual effects in this movie are very impressive. It is animated but often the characters look very life-like.
Personally, I don't believe in Santa Clause as most adults presumably don't, but lying to children and then staging an elaborate conspiracy to keep them believing I thought was morally troubling. If lying is bad how is this a good thing? Perhaps the person who said that lying is bad was lying? The lesson I learned from all this is that lying is not bad or good. Lying is just lying and everyone lies to some degree, but most people lie because they want other people to be happy. Lying to your children about Santa Clause may make them happy, so whatever works is okay. This is a very pragmatic approach, one that even politicians can use to justify lies to voters.
In the movie the boy could not hear Santa's bell and he could not see Santa either. However, when the boy wanted to believe he could hear the bell and he could see Santa Clause. I thought maybe the message of this scene is that you will believe if you want to believe.
The nerdy kid in the movie, when the train started moving on ice, believed that everything that happened was an optical illusion. The conductor says that even things you cannot see are real. At the end the conductor gives a ticket to this nerdy kid with the words LEARN on it, but the conductor covers the R, so it reads LEAN. The kid is sure it said LEAN based on what he could see but just because he couldn't see the R it doesn't mean it didn't exist, and so this is something he could learn from.
At the beginning of the movie, when the conductor was asking whether the protagonist kid wanted to get on the train, I was thinking, "Don't accept rides from strangers." A message of the movie is that you should believe and have faith in things even if you can't see it. What about faith in the goodness of strangers? Suppose a child molester drives up to a child and asks the child whether he wants to go for a ride. The child asks where the car is going and the child molester tells him he's going to the North Pole. The child might say, "My mom told me not to accept rides from strangers." The child molester might tell the child to believe that everything was going to be okay, to trust him. What I am trying to say is that a little doubt is helpful. If you always believed in everything, if you always followed your emotions, then you will likely be the victim of a scam or you will be exploited. So this movie might present some questionable values.
I saw this movie with a friend and the friend told me that lying to children about Santa Clause isn't really lying. You are just presenting to them something that they can understand. He gave an example. Mechanics for example, as taught in first-year college is not the "actual explanation" but a simplified model. It is simplified so that less intelligent people can learn it. He argued that Santa Clause is like a simplified model. But if Santa Clause is a simplified model, what is it a simplified model of? Furthermore, my friend argued that these simplified models are substitutes for the "actual explanation." Simplified models help explain certain things, e.g. Newtonian dynamics explains how objects move and allows predications to be made. But what does Santa Clause explain? How the presents appear under the Christmas tree? But the person making that explanation (the parent) is putting those presents there so that person knows he is lying. Furthermore, Santa Clause is not a simplified model. It is not simple! Santa Clause flies around the world in a short period of time delivering billions of present to the world's children. This throws up more questions than it can answer and trying to explain all those questions will complicate things. For example, if the doubting child asks, "How does Santa Clause deliver all those presents on time?" then the adult can give an explanation like, "Santa bends time by modifying the universe." How is a child supposed to understand this? It is much simpler to say, "No, there is no Santa Clause. Those presents appear there because Mom and Dad put them there." In summary, if you want a film that will put children in a Christmasy mood then The Polar Express may be good.