Klaus is a new animated Netflix film that is bound to be our new Christmans classic film.
So let’s dive into some trivia and facts about the new film.
- Klaus is a 2019 English-language Spanish animated Christmas comedy film
- It is written and directed by Sergio Pablos
- It is his directorial debut
- It is produced by SPA Studios
- With support from Aniventure
- And distributed by Netflix as its first original animated feature
- Co-written by Zach Lewis and Jim Mahoney
- The film stars Jason Schwartzman, J. K. Simmons, Rashida Jones and Joan Cusack
- Serving as a fictional origin story to the myth of Santa Claus
- The plot revolves around a postman stationed in a town to the North who befriends a reclusive toy-maker (Klaus)
- Pablos said Smeerensburg is a deliberate misspelling of Smeerenburg
- A former Dutch and Danish whaling station in the Artic archipelago of Svalbard
- After setting up his own animation studio in Madrid, Spain, director Sergio Pablos decided to develop a new traditionally-animated feature film
- Sergio Pablos had worked on Disney Renaissance films such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, and Tarzan
- Pablos wanted to explore how the medium would have evolved had western animation film studios not switched to producing mostly computer animated films since the 1990s
- For the film’s look, the studio sought to overcome some of the technical limitations that traditional animation had
- Focusing on organic and volumetric lighting and texturing to give a film a unique look
- While maintaining a hand-crafted feel
- Proprietary tools from Les films du Poisson Rouge, a French company in Angoulême, were used to allow the team to produce a variety of visual development styles
- With the aim of getting away from the standardized style of “characters looking like stickers put on painted backgrounds”
- Fellow Disney animator James Baxter, known for Beauty and the Beast, also worked on the film
- The first teaser for the project was released in April 2015
- At the time, the studio was seeking investment, co-production, and distribution partners
- It was shopped around to various studios
- They perceived it as “too risky”
- In November 2017, Netflix announced that they had acquired the global rights to Klaus
- At the same time, the casting of Schwartzman, Jones, Simmons, and Cusack were announced along with a Christmas 2019 release date
- In March 2019, it was reported that Netflix was planning an Oscar-qualifying run for Klaus in theaters
- And it was listed as one of ten films Netflix was negotiating with chains to give limited releases prior to their online debuts that August
- The film’s release date was announced, alongside the debut of an official trailer, on October 7
- The film is dedicated to animator and scene checker Mary Lescher
- He died on June 2nd, 2019 of cancer
- She had worked on Klaus, as well as other animated features such as Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King
- Klaus was released theatrically in select theaters on November 8, 2019
- It was released digitally through Netflix on November 15
- On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 90%
- Based on 30 reviews
- With an average rating of 7.4/10
- Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 63 out of 100
- Based on 9 critics
- Indicating “generally favorable reviews”
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