With the holiday season being dangerously close, an increase in holiday-inspired family movies can be expected. Netflix has become a major player in this time of year, finding success with classic holiday formulas like The Christmas Prince. And this year looks to be no different with a large selection of Netflix Original Christmas movies coming to the service over the next month.
These include what can only be assumed to soon to be cinematic classics like The Knight Before Christmas and the highly anticipated third film in the Christmas Prince series, A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby. Where Netflix has fully embraced these cliched, crowd-pleasing live-action holiday outings, they decided to start 2019 out a bit different with Klaus.
Klaus marks Netflix’s first original animated movie and serves as almost an MCU type origin story for the legend of Santa Claus. After purposefully failing his training to become a postman, in order to get back to his life of lounging in the luxury provided by his father, Jesper (Jason Schwartzman) is sent to the remote and cold island of Smeerensburg, which is torn apart by a long-standing feud between two rival groups. Jesper is given 1 year to establish a post office and send 6,000 letters or else he will be permanently cut off from his family’s wealth.
At first, Jesper struggles, but quickly finds that by pairing up with a mysterious man named Klaus (J. K. Simmons), who lives on the outskirts of town and has tons of toys, he can get children to send letters in exchange. This grows more and more popular as a legend begins to form around the man named Klaus and the entire society seems to start to warm up.
As a fan of animation, despite the trailers and teasers for Klaus not creating too much excitement, the hype was there for the film simply because of the bigger implications that came with this movie’s release. Animation is a precious medium, that sadly is often overlooked and pushed aside as a format exclusively for kids. Klaus isn’t going to change that itself, but seeing a platform like Netflix embrace the medium and start to work with it is deeply exciting.
Already with their next animated original, an adult-focused animated drama titled I Lost My Body, the scale of distribution of and attention towards these types of films could mean huge things for the medium. While Klaus is not a revolutionary or really even that great of a film on its own, it still is a solid start for Netflix in the animated world and the holiday season.
The main thing about Klaus that stands out is simply the animation in it. Embracing a really dynamic style of 2D animation that comes off as layered and complex. The angles and depth given to these characters and this environment were not only unique but really impressive. The only film I can really compare this to is Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
Although Klaus doesn’t come close to matching the sheer brilliance which was the visuals in Spider-Verse, it has the same feel of complexity in its environments and animation. The format continues to be effective and breathtaking – especially when it comes off as incredibly smooth. Sometimes when a film gets more complex you can tell the frame rate goes down and the animation becomes choppy.
The actual setting also comes off as breathtaking on its own. Where this cold, snowed in town is nothing new, there are calm scenes – such as the wind flowing through the birdhouses – that Klaus keeps building the beauty of the memorable landscape. It is peaceful and stunning when everything calms down and the audience is allowed to simply breathe with the wind.
The story is where the film falls, sadly, becoming forgettable overall. Where this is a unique origin to Santa Claus and the legend around him, the plot comes off as generic and basic, especially in its structure. The conflict comes off as cheap and forced, following the exact same structure as a million movies both animated and live-action before it.
Due to this, Klaus never successfully creates any form of tension or engagement from the audience. We all know how this story will go from the set up alone. Jasper is a rich kid, who lives in luxury, and is forced into an environment he hates. He has to complete an impossible task and ends up finding happiness in this new life and accomplishing his goal. The unseen conflict finally comes to light in the third act, but once again leaving him alone until he overcomes it.
It’s nothing new or interesting and sadly really brought the movie down. The last 10 minutes are also a little wild where they attempt to take the character of Klaus. Without getting into spoilers, how they end his story left me truly baffled and scratching my head.
Sadly, the voice acting also had mixed effectiveness. Jason Schwartzman gives a fine voice performance as Jasper, but I never was able to get behind J. K. Simmons as Klaus. Whenever he spoke, the voice never quite matched the character, and was so easily identifiable as Simmons that it became distracting. Klaus walks the line of being a man of few words, coming off as almost intimidating. Or being a charming man with a good heart. And his performance never quite found the balance between these elements.
The script also came off as muddled, especially in the beginning. It seemed like it was embracing having a lack of dialogue in most scenes, really using the visuals as a form of storytelling. Which is fine on its own, but it abandons this about halfway through, creating a weird switch of dynamics which was noticeable.
Also, if you are someone who hates the recent trend of using bad pop songs in animated kids movies, I also must warn you that Klaus is filled with them. Really taking me out of the more quiet and majestic scenes this movie had throughout, and kind of reducing the impact.
Overall, Klaus is far from a bad movie. It is a perfectly fine holiday animated movie, but it never is able to reach above that. The animation is spectacular, it is just the rest of the movie utilizes familiar cliches that prevented it from ever becoming something overly notable in the context of 2019 animation. It is competent and enjoyable, but does not have the depth or innovation needed to really become something special.
