Been watching a lot of children’s Christmas programs with the little man lately. I notice one disturbing trend: somewhere within 5 years after 2000, seemingly every studio decided “let’s fire all our animators and flex our CGI skills.”

Only 5 years separate “Mickey’s Once Upon a Christmas” (1999) and “Mickey’s Twice...” (2004), yet the drop in quality is appalling.
Idiotically, scriptwriters also adopted an irreverent approach to their characters, full of awkward one-liners to accompany the animation—>CGI shift

Unfortunately, that shift is one we’ve never snapped out of. “The Polar Express” (2005) and “A Christmas Carol” (2009 were more resume-builders for CGI architects, this time with A-list actors in the petri dish (“no, but really, you’re impressed!”).

Not all films can be “Shrek,” and not every script creates “Elf.” CGI has made solid children’s films, and the irreverent script-writing approach has made good live-action Christmas films.
But I wish studios recognized the Christmas animation genre is fundamentally traditional.