Menage à Trois Bingo

I took Rosa to the company Kids' Holiday event Saturday: a private showing
of _The Polar Express_. For a basically sweet story that could be summed up
in a single sentence (Boy who is losing faith in Santa Claus gets a
faith-restoring trip to the North Pole), it's got a disturbing undercurrent
of creepy and scary. This may have been exacerbated by the fact that we were
sitting in the third row, at her request, but Rosa was frankly terrified in
parts, and kept asking to be taken home. I should have listened to her.

No one actually gets hurt in any way, but there are a number of near-miss
disasters involving the eponymous train: a frozen lake over the tracks, the
calamitous cracking of that same ice, a very steep rollercoasterish decline,
rocking back and forth of the locomotive with small children on it. The
central character spends much of the trip on the outside of the
snow-and-ice-covered train. I was scared myself.

Also, most of the adult characters from the train conductor to a ghostly
hobo to the engineer and stoker to the North Pole denizen elves, are
slightly creepy in either appearance or behavior. It's mostly the tones of
voice, I guess, but I kept reading anger and threat into their words and
postures. While one elf encourages a boy to trust him, his body language
says "I'm going to steal your present."

On the other hand, the animation is gorgeous and, as I said at the
beginning, the basic story is awfully sweet. Maybe the problem was that the
movie is directed to older children who are at the end of the Santa
Claus stage, say eight or nine, rather than Rosa's five, and someone thinks
older children need more "suspense". I felt cheated, though; I had expected
sweet and cuddly, and I got creepy and nerve-jangling.

Ray apparently has a copy of the original book. I've never read it; I'm
interested to see whether the creepiness is in the book, too, or whether it
was introduced by the filmmakers. Rosa told me he had put it away somewhere
because "it was too long".

She's never believed in Santa Claus, actually; she's scared of mall santas.
I ask her every year, but she always refuses to go visit Santa. After the
movie, I asked her if Santa was real. She said something interesting. She
said, "He's real but it's just a man in a costume." I'm not sure whether
that meant that a) obviously there's a real man in that costume, or b)
there's a real "santa spirit" but Santa himself isn't real or c) who knows
what.