Reel Life
The Polar Express
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2004

One of the advantages of being a technology journalist is that it gives you an excuse to buy the coolest new gadgets and go to the latest computer-animated movies without appearing to be an arrested adolescent. It was thus in a purely professional capacity that I settled into my seat one December evening in front of the 30-meter-wide Imax screen at San Francisco's Sony Metreon, a high-tech entertainment complex.

I was there to see The Polar Express, a rendition by director Robert Zemeckis of the lovely illustrated children's book of the same name. The movie tells the story of a young boy with doubts about the existence of Santa Claus. On Christmas Eve, a magical steam-locomotive passenger train arrives on the boy's street and transports him through snow-covered forests and mountains to the North Pole, where, of course, there really is a Santa.