I love Christmas, getting to spend time with my family, giving and receiving presents, and eating so much that I feel like I’m actually going to die. But this year I’m not feeling that Christmassy, the virus and all the other shit going on in the world will do that to somebody. To remedy this, I made the stupid decision to watch one Christmas movie every day until the 25th, today I made the even more stupid decision to review them all. I was thinking of doing a sort of advent like review series but realised that with university work, I wouldn’t be able to release a review every day for 25 days straight, doing 25 over December at all is going to be hard so this might leak into January a bit but just know that over the next few weeks I’m going to attempt to write 25 Christmas themed reviews. Now these won’t be the long dissections that my usual reviews are, I just haven’t got the time, just a fun little exploration of all things Christmassy, the reviews will probably be around 1000 words each. I’m also going to split the reviews into two sections, the spoiler-free section, and the spoiler section, everyone needs some holiday movie suggestions this time of year so if the movie sounds interesting to you than you can go watch it before reading my spoiler section, cool? Cool.
Before I started this marathon, I knew that most of the movies I’d watch would end up being awful but I wanted to start with something good, after a bit of looking I came across Klaus, a movie that seemed very promising. It was nominated for best animated picture at the Oscars, it’s got a beautiful blend of hand-drawn and CG animation, it was directed by Sergio Pablos who’s best known for working on Treasure Planet, yeah, I’m interested.
Klaus tells the origin story of Santa Claus, when I found this out, I was sceptical, this could have easily been a Solo situation where they try to overly explain every little detail that nobody cares about, luckily it doesn’t do that, yeah, they explain the origin of concepts like the naughty list and Santa using reindeers but they do it in a fun way. The movie avoids being cringy by not being overly preachy, you don’t get a scene of Santa explaining the meaning of Christmas, no he’s presented as simply a nice guy, but not some Christmas-loving god. Santa is a hard character to get right because more often than not, people see him as a perfect person, perfect people are rarely interesting, you need flaws, Klaus gives Santa these flaws that are necessary for him to become my favourite on-screen presentation of Santa Claus. I love really friendly characters when they are done right, and to do them right you’ve got to make them somebody who has flaws but will always try there best to do what’s right, examples include Iroh from Avatar and Mob from Mob Psycho 100, Mob sometimes loses his temper and Iroh is a war criminal so yeah, they’ve got some minor flaws. By making Santa a man who wants to deliver presents to kids yet can get angry, and upset, you make him interesting.
Santa’s origin story is told through the eyes of Jesper (he is essentially Kuzco from The Emperor’s New Groove), the son of the Postmaster General who has been sent to the town Smeerensburg to prove to his father that he’s not absolutely useless. In Smeerensburg everybody always fights so Jesper and his new friend Klaus must team up to unite the town and spread toys and joy to all the kids. Yeah, the premise is basic but it’s so charming, by grounding the Santa story you make it a story of humanity instead of a selfless god who delivers presents to all the good boys and girls.
The movie is animated beautifully, Sergio Pablos has stated that he didn’t want to just recreate the hand drawn animation of the past, but wanted to use modern technology to create what a traditionally animated movie would look like today if the style was still popular. Traditionally animated movies just look better most of the time, usually they have more expressive characters, better looking environments, and have more of a unique presence, whilst I love a lot of CG movies it’s rarely the visuals that I gush over, it goes stop-motion is the best, then traditionally animated movies, then CG movies. The environments are beautiful in Klaus, but it’s the characters that are animated the best, Jesper is one of the most expressive characters I’ve ever seen on film.
The movie is really funny as well, the physical comedy works really well due to the stellar animation, the movie has a lot of sarcastic characters who are a joy to watch, the dark comedy really lands including a suicide joke which I’m surprised they got away with but was fucking hilarious.
The music is actually kind of trash, they use modern pop songs which just don’t work, not only is this movie set in the past immediately making them feel off, I don’t even think the songs would work if it was set in modern times, random popular pop songs almost always make a movie worse, I’m not sure why they keep adding them.
But yeah, watch this movie, it’s one of the best Christmas movies ever made and if I’m being honest, I think it should have beaten Toy Story 4 and got best animated picture at the Oscars, it’s just a better movie than Toy Story 4. So yeah 8 / 10, go watch it, it’s on Netflix, if you don’t care about spoilers or have already watched it feel free to keep reading as from here on out, there be spoilers.
Spoilers
Another problem with the movie is the liar reveal trope, I have seen this trope be done well only a handful of times, and I’ve never seen it done well in a movie as they aren’t long enough to truly explore the consequences of the lie, if you are going to do a liar exposed scene then make sure the consequences of that are more than a one minute “I hate you but now I don’t” scene. The problem with this trope is that it’s always in the back of the viewers mind, we know they’re going to argue so it just becomes a game of waiting for it to happen instead of fully enjoying what’s actually going on. Also, we’ve all seen the scene of everybody walking away from the liar just for the liar to do a heroic act and they all forgive them section of a movie too many times. It’s even worse here because I don’t think the characters would get too mad at Jesper, Jesper has to deliver a certain number of letters so he’d be allowed home, because of this he creates the idea of Santa so kids deliver him letters, of course he stops doing it for selfish reasons halfway through the movie, and Jesper explains this quite well, I think they’d understand that he changed because of him explaining it and the fact that he didn’t jump on the opportunity to go home. But other than this lame ass trope and the pop music, Klaus is amazing.
Santa’s death is done really well, the scene of Klaus walking into the snow storm is beautiful, when Jesper talked about getting to see his friend once a year I almost teared up. I like the idea that Santa only gained magic powers and became the god-like character we all know after he died, it keeps the magic for the kids who are watching whilst giving adults a well-written character.
Klaus is such an interesting character, a man who lost his wife and has been completely lost ever since, yet is still kind and wants to do for the kids Smeerensburg what he wanted to do for his own kids that he never ended up being able to have, it’s charming and Klaus is definitely the best version of Santa I’ve ever seen in a movie. Jesper is incredibly entertaining, whilst his arc has been done numerous times, by grounding him and not starting him off as a complete asshole there is never a point where you absolutely hate him, he’s just a spoilt brat, not Satan. Alva is alright, she is like a 6 / 10 love interest character, not interesting enough that I want to learn anything more about her, but she does have a personality beyond just falling in love with Jesper, she also serves as a great example throughout the movie as to how Jesper and Klaus are affecting the town positively. Márgu is adorable, and hey look, Klaus has better Sámi representation than Frozen II which boasted about their Sámi representation whenever they could.
So that was Klaus, thanks for reading, if you have any holiday movie suggestions leave them in the comments, thanks for reading, bye, bye.
Mainstream404 