9 / 10
Official trailer
Jason Schwartzman voices Jesper and J.K. Simmons voices Klaus, with Rashida Jones as Alva, Joan Cusack as Mrs. Krum and Will Sasso as Mr. Ellingboe. Sergio Pablos, Jim Mahoney, and Zach Lewis wrote the screenplay. The Spanish animation studio The SPA Studios produced the film for Netflix release in November 2019. Klaus was the first feature production from former Disney animator Sergio Pablos’s studio and used a hybrid 2D-3D rendering technique developed for the film. I like Klaus for its bad temper. For most of its running time it’s cold, cranky and self-interested, it looks like nothing else in animation, and when the warmth finally arrives it moves me without once begging. I don’t hand out 9s to Christmas films easily, and this one deserved every point.
Klaus ranks among the most successful Santa-origin films ever made and is possibly the strongest theatrical-quality animated feature of the late 2010s. Pablos worked at Disney during the 1990s including on Tarzan and Treasure Planet, and the film carries the Disney house-style draftsmanship while applying it to a darker pre-Christmas town than Disney would have rendered.
The fictional town of Smeerensburg is divided between two feuding family clans whose members brutalize each other generationally, and the film’s central question is whether the introduction of small acts of kindness can interrupt a self-sustaining cycle of social cruelty. The answer the film provides is conditional and slow instead of miraculous.
Sergio Pablos’s Visual Style
Klaus combines hand-drawn 2D character animation with 3D lighting and rendering effects produced through software developed at The SPA Studios. The resulting images carry the warmth of traditional cel animation with the depth and atmospheric effects of modern computer animation. The hybrid technique solves the long-standing problem of how to give 2D animation the dimensionality that modern audiences expect without abandoning the hand-drawn aesthetic.
The visual style is the film’s strongest argument for itself, and it knocks me flat. Weather, fog and snow move in three dimensions around hand-drawn characters in Smeerensburg, and the forest where Klaus lives has a depth and texture cel animation never had. Nothing else in animation history looks like this, and I wish more studios had tried.
For Writers
Hybrid animation techniques can solve particular aesthetic problems that pure 2D or pure 3D animation can’t solve alone. Klaus’s visual style is a direct technical response to audience expectations about animated dimensionality.
The Anti-Sentiment Approach
Pablos’s screenplay refuses easy sentimentality at every available opportunity.
Jesper is a self-interested protagonist who befriends Klaus for cynical reasons. The townspeople accept gifts and toys initially as transactions instead of as expressions of community. The Klaus-Jesper friendship develops slowly and through small recurring contact instead of through dramatic single events. Even the closing-act emotional payoff is delivered in restrained gestures instead of in declarations.
That restraint is why the payoff wrecks me. When Klaus’s history with his late wife and the wooden toys finally comes out, the film has spent eighty minutes refusing to ask for my tears, and it gets them anyway. I think it’s the best-earned emotional moment in any Christmas film I know.
For Writers
Sentimental payoffs in Christmas productions hit harder when the preceding screenplay refuses preemptive emotional manipulation. Klaus’s restraint makes its eventual feelings effective.
The Origin-Story Architecture
The screenplay invents a coherent set of explanations for Santa Claus traditions through the natural progression of the Jesper-Klaus story instead of through retrofitted origin material. The lists of children who want toys arise naturally from logistical problems. The chimney delivery method emerges from a specific home’s security situation.
The reindeer enter the story through a particular late-act circumstance. Each Santa-tradition element gets a story-based origin instead of a thrown-in joke.
By the time the elderly Klaus, his wife and the bearded delivery-man imagery appear in their familiar form, the screenplay has built every piece from material it planted earlier. I get real pleasure from watching the lists, the chimney and the reindeer click into place one by one. It’s the smartest origin story I know of in modern animation.
For Writers
Origin stories work best when each element of the eventual myth has been planted earlier in the screenplay instead of introduced through plot convenience. Klaus’s architecture shows the technique.
Craft Note
Klaus cost approximately forty million dollars and was produced over five years, with Netflix providing financing and distribution. The film won seven Annie Awards, including Best Animated Feature. It also received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature, losing to Toy Story 4. The film was Netflix’s first major animated feature production and its success contributed to Netflix’s later expansion of animated theatrical-feature financing.
Is Klaus as good as people say?
Klaus is the best new Christmas film in decades as far as I’m concerned, and a high point of late-2010s animation. Pablos’s visual style, the refusal to go soft early and the careful origin architecture add up to a film that justifies its warmth without cutting corners on craft. It’s a 9 and very close to a 10, and I’d put it right beside the classics of the season.
