Movie Review – Klaus

Klaus (2019)
Written by Sergio Pablos, Jim Mahoney, and Zach Lewis
Directed by Sergio Pablas

The origins of Santa Claus have been the fodder for several pieces of modern American media. Rankin-Bass’ 1970 special Santa Claus is Coming to Town sees Santa as an orphan raised by elves. The animation company would do it again in 1985 with The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, based on the novel of the same name by L. Frank Baum. 1985 was also the year the producing partnership of the Salkinds put out their gaudy Santa Claus: The Movie, which provided its own take on St. Nick’s beginnings. Other films have hinted at the origins of Santa and his elves through worldbuilding, like Disney’s The Santa Clause. So, why would someone else want to tackle this again? 

In 19th-century Norway, a spoiled & self-centered Jesper Johansen is punished by his father, the head of the Royal Post Office, by being sent to the remote town of Smeerensburg. The only way Jesper will be allowed to come home is if he delivers 6,000 letters within a year. The problem with this village is that its citizens are mostly two families embroiled in a multi-generational feud; hence, no letters are sent in the community. 

Jesper eventually meets a kind & reclusive woodsman named Klaus. Klaus makes wooden toys as a hobby, and after an intimidating first meeting, Jesper realizes the man could help change things. Klaus delivers toys to the children, which makes them want more. Jesper tells the kids Klaus can see if they are being good or bad, so they should help stop the quarreling between the families to receive more gifts. And thus, the legend of Santa Claus is born but doesn’t quite go the way you might expect.

If the animation style of Klaus bears some familiarity, that might be because its director Sergio Pablos worked on Disney films like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and A Goofy Movie. He was also part of the team that gave us the excruciating Despicable Me/Minions franchise. Despite that “sin,” Klaus looks terrific. It is one of the more original and satisfying animated films (that isn’t Japanese) that I’ve seen in a while. The character designs are interesting, and don’t feel like the animators just mimic popular styles. Those elements are in there, but it’s clear they were given the ability to do their own thing. 

The problem comes with the story & pacing of the film. Every aspect outside of the animation feels remarkably lazy. There’s a strained effort to squeeze from tears the audience with some undeniably cloying, maudlin emotional beats. This is one of those Christmas films where it’s dead set on making us “feel the magic,” which can only happen organically. In the case of Klaus, it ends up feeling very corporate, very formulaic, in other words, very Netflix. The jokes never quite hit, either. So, neither the comedy nor drama of the story are very clever. I’m a big believer that media made for kids shouldn’t disrespect their intelligence and put as much effort into the script as you would for a more mature film.

There are also tons of cliches from start to finish. The protagonist has something to prove to his father, which goes down a rabbit hole of tropes that come to the conclusion you can imagine from scene one. There are “funny” montage sequences set to generic pop music. The antagonists’ motivation feels paper thin, leading to a lack of dramatic tension.

I never felt like I had a strong sense of Klaus, either. While he’s strangely not the film’s main character, he is the title one, and by the end, I didn’t really understand who he was supposed to be. The creators have done their homework on the current Christmas canon but only use that for aesthetics. I still feel that the 1965 Charlie Brown Christmas and 1966 animated Grinch cartoon set the bar so high that little has been able to live up to that since.

What put up the biggest red flags for me was the film’s bizarre choice to make the turnaround in Smeerensburg centered around the children’s desire for more toys. That makes everyone pleasant by the movie’s end: children doing good deeds simply for the material rewards they would receive. I was hoping the film would make a turn and look at how important community is, and that becomes the focus, but nope, it is a Christmas movie that tells us getting stuff is a reason to be good.

I’m not going to pretend that Christmas is anything other than a method for capitalist societies to get people to seasonally overspend and go into debt, but you would hope some of the media wouldn’t focus entirely on that. Typically, these kinds of movies focus on the humanity of the situation, so I guess we could applaud Klaus for being honest in its terrible message.