Daily Inspiration Quote by Leonard Maltin

Maltin’s line isn’t a neutral descriptor so much as a quiet indictment: The Polar Express may move and speak like animation, but in his view it doesn’t think like it. By calling it “not an attempt to do animation,” he’s drawing a border between an art form with a century of visual problem-solving and a movie that treats imagery as a lab demo. The phrase “attempt to do” carries the sting; it suggests intention matters as much as outcome, and that Zemeckis’ motion-capture experiment is aiming at something adjacent to animation’s traditional goals: expressive exaggeration, graphic design, and the hand-made elasticity of performance.

“Technology-based” is also a culturally loaded label, especially in the mid-2000s, when studios were selling digital novelty as inevitability. The Polar Express arrived during the early, uncanny-valley years of mocap, when the promise was human realism and the result often felt like a haunted wax museum. Maltin’s subtext is that the film’s defining feature isn’t story, character, or even style, but the tool itself - and that the tool is being asked to justify the movie.

As a critic, Maltin is signaling a broader anxiety: when craft gets reframed as R&D, audiences become beta testers. The magic of Christmas wonder, in this context, is competing with a different kind of awe - not “believe,” but “look what the software can do.”