Klaus movie review & film summary (2019)

The look and sound and personality of "Klaus" are the main reasons to watch it. It's a fairy tale-inflected period piece that has a slightly different look and feel from the Pixar-DreamWorks-Blue Sky usual— essentially '90s Disney by way of 19th storybook illustrations and much older woodcuts. Pablos came up during the final years of Walt Disney's traditional, hand-drawn animation department, working on such blockbusters as "Tarzan," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," and "Hercules." Even though "Klaus" was made digitally, you can feel the influence of that period. The images are intricately molded and shaded, and composed in a way that often mimics a lavishly budgeted, live-action Disney fantasy; but the film isn't knocking itself out to convince you that anything onscreen is "real," in the manner of recent Disney 3-D animated remakes like "The Lion King," or even "Toy Story 4," with its photorealistic roads, rain, and foliage. I doubt pens ever touched ink except at the concept stage, yet the whole thing feels sketched and painted by human hands, and both the landscapes and the characters' movements are more about realizing dramatic or comic notions than making you think anything in the story could "really happen."

The writing (by Pablos, Zach Lewis and Jim Mahoney) is less distinctive: a "selfish person learns to care about others" storyline; anachronistic dialogue packed with slang that'll be dated in a year, and moments where characters high-five each other, which I'm pretty sure wasn't common in the 19th century; a rather thin "strong woman" character who is mainly there to enable and reflect the hero's evolution (Rashida Jones' fishmarket butcher, who used to be a schoolteacher back when the citizenry cared about learning stuff). And of course there are occasional pop songs on the soundtrack, a practice that has become mandatory in animated features post-"Shrek." 

But because the Pixar-DreamWorks-Blue Sky usual is the only kind of animation that's allowed into mainstream theaters right now, even a minor variation is so commercially poisonous for animators that "Klaus"—the umpteenth version of one of the most-retold stories in history, and a film that fits the marketplace template pretty well, all things considered—was reportedly hard to fund. It was finally made by Netflix, and (following a brief theatrical run) it will mainly be seen on TVs, laptops, and phones rather than on theater screens, where its most distinctive qualities are more likely to be appreciated. 

There's a business story in all of this, and not one that will gladden young animators' hearts. I'm not a kid anymore, but I still might write a letter to Santa this year asking for the range of artistic possibilities for commercial animation to open up again, so that films like "Klaus"—and Laika animated features like "Coraline" and "Missing Link," and idiosyncratic imports like "A Cat in Paris" and "Funan"—won't be treated like troubling deviations from the norm.

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