We interrupt the 3D file browsing series for this Santa-holiday one-off post. If you’re trapped somewhere needing design-and-Santa-related distraction, here’s a bunch of words, images, and links for you.
Longtime readers may recall the Who Did it Better? Santa Claus edition from 2020, in which I took a look at speculative interfaces that help Santa Claus do his Saintly Nick business. (If not, check it out at the link above, especially if you need a refresher on the core myth.) Earlier this year a dear friend mentioned Rise the Guardians as an additional candidate. So I watched it, and hereby add it as an addendum to that study. I might make it a habit to do every year, because they aren’t going to stop making Santa movies anytime soon.
Spoiler alert: There aren’t many interfaces, and they don’t fare well, but the joy is in the analysis, so let’s dive in.
Quick plot recap
Children around the world are protected by a group called the Guardians:
- North (Santa)
- Tooth (the Tooth Fairy)
- (the Easter) Bunnymund
- Sandman
…all appointed by the mysterious Man in the Moon. Who is just the moon, communicating via moonbeams.
One day, an ancient foe named Pitch Black returns, who plots to get all the children to stop believing in the guardians, thereby robbing them of their power and clearing the way for his fear-mongering world domination. In response, the Man in the Moon names a new Guardian to help defeat him: Jack Frost. Jack initially resists, but over the course of the film and the help of one special child, Jack comes around, learns to care, and helps defeat Pitch. Children around the world believe in him, and he formally joins the ranks of the Guardians.
n.b. Santa’s are only a subset of the film’s devices
The abilities of the Guardians are a blend of innate magic and magic items, fueled with *vaguely gestures at childhood belief* and not a lot of observable cause-and-effect interfaces. For instance, when Pitch breaks Jack’s magic crook, Jack just holds the pieces and wills it back whole with glowy sparkliness and grunting psychic effort despite never having done anything like this before. No interfaces there. Magic things don’t really befit the usual sort of analysis done on this blog. But North does have three interfaces to do his gift-giving duties that bear the cold light of examination, you heartless, Vulcan bastards. (Yaaay! My people!)
- Snow globes
- Sleigh dashboard
- The Belief Globe
(Tooth and her hummingbird-like Baby Teeth helpers have some proper interfaces as well, but are kind of creepy and this post is about Santa tech. Maybe I’ll do teeth tech interfaces later. Maybe March 6.)
Snow globes
These handheld spheres look like the popular winter decorations, but with no base by which they can rest on a surface. Instead they are kept loose in the user’s pocket until they are needed. By shaking it and speaking a destination, a preview of the destination appears on the inside, surrounded by swirls of “snow.” Then by pitching it like a baseball, the globe disappears in a puff, replaced with a circular portal to that destination. Move or toss something through, and the portal closes behind.
If this interface seems well-designed, that’s because the examples in the movie are damned convenient. Each time we see a snow globe used in the movie…
- …the destination has a globally-unique name
- …the destination has a unique and easily identifiable landmark to display in the globe
- …the appearance of the destination is already known to the user, so the visual helps confirm the selection
But change any one of these, and it starts to fail. Consider if North, in the course of doing his Santa-ly duties, had to jump to a “San José.” There are at least 334 San Josés around the world. Very few of which have identifiable landmarks. How does North know the one that’s being visualized is the right one? He might have eidetic memory because of Рождество Христово magic or something, but these tools are used by the yetis, too, and I doubt they have that same gift.
How would it help them disambiguate? If the displayed destination is not the right one, how does the user provide more specificity to get to the right one? What if they only know the name? How does the snow globe help them narrow things down from 334 to 1? Since the globe disappears on use, and pockets have a limited capacity, the cost for getting it wrong can be quite high. The yetis might very well have to walk back to the North Pole should they run out.
Maybe, maybe, there are only a limited number of destinations possible, but then you’d expect some reference on the globe itself to help a user know that.
It’s also worth noting that there’s no indication how the portals know when it’s OK to close, rather than say, chopping the traveler in half or leaving them stranded. Is it time-based? Where’s the countdown? Is it dependent on a code word or thought? How does the user know whether the code word has been received or rejected? Does the portal close as soon as a single, “whole object” passes through? Theseus would like a word. There’s no interface in evidence, so it must be “smart,” but as we know, “smart” is not always smart, and design is critical for making users more confident and avoiding costly errors. There are far too many unanswered questions to give this any stamp of approval.
Sleigh dashboard
North has a sleigh of course. It has a dashboard with some controls. One of these controls we see in use is a lever, whose purpose is a mystery. It can’t be a booster, since the motile force here is rangiferine, not mechanical. The control is shaped like an engine control lever on a boat or a thrust control on an airplane. After the switch is thrown, the camera cuts to a very blurry shot of the sleigh’s undercarriage where, if something happens, I can’t discern what is it. Maybe the runners go from flat to vertical, for a more ice-skating-like experience? Exacerbating our lack of information, the control is unlabeled, so it’s hard for a new user to know what it does, or what state it’s in, or what the options are. It has no safety mechanism, so depending on the force required, might be easily accidentally activated. Cannot recommend this, either.
The major element in the dashboard is a large globe inset in its center. It’s roughly shoulder-width in diameter. We never see it in use, but it bears great resemblance to the Belief Globe (see below). I want to believe it’s a you-are-here navigation device that automatically orients to match the position and bearing of the sleigh, because that might be useful. And it would be an awesome opportunity for a super-charming brass location indicator, mounted to a quarter-meridian arm. But I suspect this device is actually meant to be a miniaturized copy of the Belief Globe, which would not be useful for reasons you’ll read in the next section.
The Belief Globe
This display is not explicitly named over the course of the movie, but I have to call it something. It is a huge globe that mechanically rotates in the center of North’s arctic fortress. It is covered with beautiful, arcane symbols and Cyrillic writing (North is Russian—this movie was from the halcyon days between the end of the Cold War and its horrific current genocidal landgrab attempts against Ukraine), and displays tiny points of light all over it.
Tooth, explaining the globe to Jack, says, “Each of those lights is a child.” North explains further, “A child who believes.” But some of the dots are bigger and others brighter. It’s unclear what information those variables are meant to convey. Older kids? Degree of belief? Relative niceness? We don’t see anyone looking into individual dots, which, if that’s not possible, really means that this device, diegetically, just shows where the Guardians might want to focus their activities, conspicuously, to bolster Belief in that geographical area.
And belief seems to be at critical levels. I asked chatGPT to count the dots in the second image in the gallery above. It estimated 39,674 dots and that that pictured chunk of South America to be about 12% of the world’s total landmass, excluding Antarctica. South America has around 5% of the world’s total population, which extrapolates out to a total 725,280 dots we would expect to see across the world. According to populationpyramid.com, global population in 2012—the time this film was released—was 7.2 billion, with 1.91 billion being 14 years old or younger (a generous age for childlike belief, since the average age of losing faith in a “real” Santa tends to be around 10 years old in the USA, but let’s run with it.)
That means that in the world of the Guardians, only 4 out of 100 children believe in any of them to begin with, even before Pitch comes a-calling. This would have been so easy to fix in the script. Have Tooth say, “These lights represent children who believe.” The plural would have left it ambiguous.
But I’ve digressed.
North has a viewing deck which seems custom-built for observing the globe, and which gives us an important perspective for analysis.
This over-the-yeti-shoulder shot helps point out a major failing of this display: visibility of the information.
With the globe anchored in place at the poles and the observation deck so low, this makes the dots in the southern hemisphere much more prominent in the viewers’ sight, introducing an availability bias. It looks like anything above 50N latitude is just…out of sight, and that includes significant populations in Europe as well as North’s own fortress. (We’ll see in the Control Panel that there’s a miniature globe mounted there that provides a view of the Northern Hemisphere, but we don’t see lights on it, and it would be a bad idea to split the information across two sources of differing scales, anyway. So let’s hope that’s not its intended purpose.)
There is an easy fix for the orientation problem, and it of course comes from the world of globe-making. By attaching the poles of the globe to a full meridian that encircles the globe, and then attaching the full meridian to a half meridian at the equator, you create a gimbal that allows the globe to rotate to any orientation.
This is called a full-swing mount, and it would allow arbitrary inspection of any point on the globe. It would be lovely to see writ large and mechanical in the film.
This display also privileges land in a possibly-misleading way, in the same way that election maps can. Let’s all recall that land doesn’t vote, but this kind of implies otherwise.
For example, on the Belief Globe, it looks like Australian kids are way behind in Belief metrics than New Zealand kids, but Australia has a density of 3.4 inhabitants per square kilometer compared to New Zealand’s 19.1, and this map doesn’t make that easy to understand. Proportion of per capita belief would be a better metric for delivering actionable Santa insight.
Even better would be to show change in belief over time (“боже мой!” North might shout, “Bunny! Get to Czech Republic, немедленно!”), though information over time is notoriously difficult to do on a geographical map.
But even if we solve the orientation and representation problems, putting the information on a globe means at least half of it is out of sight at any given time. In the yeticam view above, what’s going on in Bermuda? You don’t know! It does revolve slowly, but by my own rough estimation at the speed we see in this scene, it would take around 6 minutes for this globe to make a complete, sidereal rotation, which is way, way beyond the vigilance threshold limit required to put that picture together holistically in your mind. If the whole picture is important (and I’m asserting that it is), the information display should be a map rather than a globe.
You don’t want to lose the charming magical-Soviet machine feeling of it, but with a world map, maybe you have some mechanics that physically simulate the day/night cycle? And since the Man in the Moon is so important to this story, maybe the lunar cycle as well? Or you could make some mechanical interactive fisheye focus effect, which would be even more spectacular. (Please, somebody, do this.)
I also have to note that having Belief hold such a prominent place in this command and control room seems really self-serving. That much real estate is dedicated to telling you how much gas you have in the tank? There are plenty of additional things that a Santa and his team would want to keep track of that would be of as much importance: Days until Christmas, location of kids at risk of losing belief, percentage of toys complete, bowl-full-of-jelly BMI score, naughty/nice balance in the world, current value of elf pension fund, just to name a few. These could be split-flap displays for nostalgia and lovely clacking audio opportunities.
Globe Control Panel
On the observation deck, North has a control panel of sorts. There are two parts whose functions we can infer, a trackball and a Bat-Guardian-Signal, but most of it—like the levers and joysticks with lit toggle buttons—we cannot. Let’s look at the two whose purpose we can infer.
The trackball
The trackball is a miniature Belief Globe, inset on the right hand of the control panel. It is quite similar to the trackballs we see in Arthur Christmas (2011, the year before) and The Christmas Chronicles (2018, six years later). If it controls the orientation of the Belief Globe, and its movement is constrained similarly to how the globe is, a user hoping to focus on Mauritius would have to memorize that it is due south of Oman, and do the same for the entirety of the southern hemisphere.
It should also be constrained to left-right movement like the thing being controlled, as if on a hidden inclination mount. But this looks like a free-spin trackball, so could use a knob in the pole and maybe a meridian arm to help signal its constraint. It should also be well-mapped to the globe as the observer sees it. It is not. Compare the orientation of the Globe to the trackball in the screen shot. They do not match.
All told, a pretty underthought component.
Bat-Guardian-Signal
Early in the film, when North realizes Pitch is back, he grabs the control in the far lower-right-hand corner. He twists it 90 degrees counterclockwise and pushes down. The ice-like octagonal button below begins to glow brightly.
This sets the Belief Globe to glowing with aurora lights, that extend out across the globe and alert the Guardians, signaling them to report to Commissioner Gordon North’s compound at once. Mentioned here only out of a sense of completeness, this control is germane to North’s being leader of a team rather than any of his Santa duties. It’s unlabeled, it can’t possibly have the global reach that it needs, and I’m not sure why the Globe was selected to be the source of the aurora, but meh, it’s just not that important in this context.
Final score: Lump of Coal
We have to keep in mind this is a movie for kids, and kids won’t be put off by any of these interface failings. But for our overthinking design-nerd purposes in reviewing the Santa tech, these just don’t hold up. Because of this, Rise of the Guardian’s Santa tech poses zero threat to dethroning The Santa Chronicle’s lovely Santa interfaces. But good to remind ourselves of the principles to which we should be paying attention.
Enjoy the movie for the fun voice acting, the awesome character design, the gorgeous Sandman visuals, and any nearby kids’ sense of wonder, but don’t worry about the interfaces as anything to admire or mimic in the real world.
Happy holidays, however you celebrate, to most everyone except you, asshole elf.
