Sergio Pablos has good ideas about how familiar stories might begin, and a practical curiosity about hand-drawn animation. We recommend Klaus for both, though its character writing is less inventive than its account of Christmas customs.
Fi1m perspective
In Klaus (2019), the postman has questionable reasons for doing good, while the surrounding community is busy feuding. Sergio Pablos makes that a promising starting point for a Christmas film: kindness will require some effort here. We were amused by the difficulty of finding someone fit to introduce a little festive goodwill. The pleasure comes from watching familiar customs take shape through unlikely causes. It is a good family film, provided the family can tolerate a fair amount of ill temper.
Pablos came to developing his own stories after animation work on features including The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) and Tarzan (1999). He devised the original story and characters for Despicable Me (2010), on which he was executive producer, and developed the concept behind Smallfoot (2018), again serving as executive producer. Those credits matter, but they do not make every decision in either finished film his. With Klaus, his directorial debut, he also wrote and produced, giving us a clearer sense of his own choices.
His interest in hand-drawn animation extends to changing how it is made. Pablos has developed lighting tools to give it some of the expressive freedom of computer animation while retaining the character of the drawings. The handsome results in Klaus reward that effort, even when the story settles into familiar lessons about becoming a better person. The film gives us good reason to want him to keep working with the technique.
The writing needs more attention. Pablos and fellow writers Jim Mahoney and Zach Lewis are resourceful about the beginnings of Santa's customs, but give some supporting characters too little beyond their unpleasantness. A questionable motive for generosity is interesting; another insult from someone we already know is disagreeable is less so. This is where the film's oddness stops helping, and the predictable redemption story becomes harder to overlook. Start with Klaus, provided a Christmas film full of quarrelling sounds tolerable.
Biography
Sergio Pablos is a Spanish animator, director and screenwriter. He trained at the California Institute of the Arts and began his career as an animator at Walt Disney Feature Animation, contributing to films including The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997), Tarzan (1999) and Treasure Planet (2002).
He later founded The SPA Studios in Madrid. Pablos created the original story for Despicable Me (2010) and Smallfoot (2018). He wrote, directed and produced Klaus (2019), Netflix’s first original animated feature, in which he also voiced Pumpkin and Olaf; the film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature.
