Despite an Oscar nomination, you’ve probably forgotten about Klaus, a 2019 animated Christmas film from Netflix. I must confess that I watched the movie when it premiered, but not in the two Christmas seasons since. That is a great shame because Klaus does something remarkable that most Christmas movies rarely achieve: it tells its plot refreshingly. It takes a story you know and spins it in a new, exciting way. The film offers enough quirkiness and subversions to jolly-up even the most Grinchiest of Netflix subscribers. Director Sergio Pablos does for Santa Claus what Christopher Nolan did for Batman — grounding the legendary figure with a plausible, real world derivation. And most refreshing of all, Pablos tells this story — which he created — with gorgeous traditional 2D animation.
Surprisingly, Klaus is only partially Santa Claus Begins. We enter this world through Jesper Johansen (voiced by Jason Shwartzman), the spoiled and overprivileged son of the Postmaster General of some unnamed country in 19th century Scandinavia. Jesper is sort of a Nordic variation on Kuzco from The Emperor’s New Groove. He lounges, he sips espresso, and complains when they forget to put croutons onto his salads. Jesper lacks any interest in his studies at the Royal Postman’s Academy.
Fed up with his son’s loafing, Dad ships his wayward son to the far-off Smeerensberg, an island midway to the North Pole, reachable only by ferryboat, captained by a surly local (voiced by Norm Macdonald in his final film role). The fog shrouded island is colored in different shades of gloom and grey, decorated with rotting fish parts and bones — animated so superbly, you can almost waft the briny stench.
His father gives Jesper one year to process 6,000 letters through the Smeerensberg post office. If Jesper fails to meet the mandate, Dad is gonna kick his scrawny, entitled ass out into the cold without a penny of Dad’s Postmaster General money. Arriving in town, in a sequence that feels more horror movie than Christmas movie, Jesper learns that the feuding island clans are too busy beating the shit out of one another to send letters much less write them. In fact, most of the kids here can’t even read or write; the local schoolteacher, Alva (a funny and touching performance from Rashida Jones), turned the schoolhouse into a fishmonger shop after the children became so busy slapping the snot out of other children that they had no time left for school.
Mailing 6,000 letters in this place seems like a distant dream for Jesper. But his potential ticket back home arrives in the form of Klaus, a white-bearded lumberman, who lives alone in the forest with a workshop full of toys. But Klaus (voiced with perfection by J.K. Simmons) ain’t the St. Nick you see at the mall. He’s intimidating and threatening, with a potential antisocial personality disorder. Klaus’s only companion is a big, sharp axe he uses to cut down trees (when he’s not just using his burly, meaty mitts to rip them apart). After initially fleeing in terror, Jesper realizes he can use Klaus and his toys to his advantage and get the children letter-writing.
He convinces the local kids that if they write letters to Klaus telling him about the good deeds they commit, Klaus will bring them toys. Despite his own self-centered interests, Jesper inadvertently foments the rise of kindness and selflessness among the young Smeerensbergians, a marked contrast to the hate and violence promulgated by their elders. Soon kids are doing acts of service for their neighbors, befriending their former enemies, and even return to school.
The fun of Klaus is watching how the different tenets of the Santa Claus myth will fall into place without any supernatural or magical sources. Klaus offers up “believable” reasons for why Santa goes down chimneys, leaves coal for brats, and uses reindeer to pull his sleigh — all conjured up by Jesper and embellished by the children’s imaginations. This storytelling jumping off point, telling the origins of the myth of Santa Claus, rather than the origins of the man himself, makes Klaus such a unique and different Christmas tale. Some viewers might be turned off by the filmmakers attempts to ground Santa’s origins in “realism”, but make no mistake: this is “realism” filtered through the off-kilter prism of cartoon fantasy. (And yes, there’s some supernatural hugger-bugger lurking in the third act.)
The filmmakers behind Klaus understand a core ingredient that makes any film a classic: it appeals to many kinds of people, kids and adults alike. Younger audiences will delight in the movie’s numerous visual gags, Looney Tunes-style physical humor, and some goofy side characters (especially the childish squabbling between the two elder clan leaders, voiced by Joan Cusack and Will Sasso, respectively.) The kids in the audience won’t spit out the film’s good-hearted message, crystallized by Klaus’s oft-repeated motto “a true selfless act always sparks another”, because the film doesn’t force feed it to them.
As an adult, I took Klaus’s singular revisionist approach as a breath of fresh air. I was pleasantly surprised by the mix of funny one-note character types with fully dimensional ones (especially Klaus and Alva) who possess histories, traumas, and disappointments. Younger viewers may not fully comprehend Klaus’s grief and anger or relate to Alva’s disillusionment with her career and life, but one day they might. Regardless of age, all can appreciate the terrific voice acting. Simmons and Jones naturally convey their characters’ conflicted and torn souls, while Schwartzman provides charm and sympathy to a character who is an irritating pain in the ass.
Klaus’s biggest success as an animated film rests in the animation. Much like the early production designs on Tim Burton films (which this movie owes a debt of inspiration to), you can see a still image from Klaus and not confuse it with any other animation. The designs are off-beat and idiosyncratic. They blend the kooky with the grotesque (Jesper’s legs are stick-like, and his nose resembles a water balloon, squeezed too tight at one end). The animators deftly use contrasts for both comedy and drama (Klaus is square and bulky; Jesper is narrow and gangly. The oversized and monosyllabic offspring of the clan leaders, Pumpkin and Olaf, are bossed about by their undersized and loquacious parents.)
The animators create an equally reimagined environment to befit such a reimagined narrative. The shimmering majesty of the Northern Lights are replaced by an omnipotent and foreboding fog that hangs in the sky. The glittering twinkle and hustle-bustle of elf-activity in Santa’s workshop becomes the serene, quiet, and lonely solitude of Klaus’s forest. Instead of suburban homes and reindeer stables are the ramshackle, dilapidated docks and shanties found in Smeerensberg.
Pablos — who worked on Disney classics like Tarzan, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Hercules before originating the story for Despicable Me— developed computer software to add texture to the hand-drawn animation, successfully blending old techniques with new tools. And that achievement holds true in every aspect of the film: grafting a new vantage point onto an old, well-loved story.
In spite of a few absolutely wretched moments where modern songs are used on the soundtrack (clearly momentary lapses in the filmmakers’ sanities), Klaus deserves to be in your annual Christmas movie rotation. I regret not watching it since 2019. I will not make that mistake again.
-T.Z.
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