Trailer
Plot summary
Jesper Johansen coasts through the Royal Postal Academy until his father, the Postmaster General, gives him a year to run a post office in Smeerensburg, a far northern island town split between the feuding Ellingboe and Krum clans, and to post 6,000 letters or be cut off from the family fortune. The ferryman Mogens carries him across, and the townsfolk give him nothing to send. In a house outside town he finds handmade toys and their maker, the reclusive woodsman Klaus, and flees, leaving behind a child's drawing. Klaus makes him deliver a toy to the child in secret. Word of it spreads, and the other children decide a letter to Klaus might bring them a toy too, an idea Jesper turns toward his quota.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Klaus (2019)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Klaus was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 92nd Academy Awards, making it the first animated film from Netflix — and the first from any streaming service — to be nominated. It lost to Toy Story 4.
- Before Netflix took it on, Sergio Pablos's Klaus was pitched to studios that mostly rejected it as "too risky" — Netflix included. Netflix announced in November 2017 that it had acquired the global rights to the film.
- Sergio Pablos workshopped origin stories for real figures like Napoleon Bonaparte and for Dracula before settling on Santa Claus, and his travels in Norway led him to include the Sami people — the reason Netflix green-lit a project it had not wanted.
- The town of Smeerensburg in the film is a deliberate misspelling of Smeerenburg, a former Dutch and Norwegian whaling station in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.
- For its hand-crafted look, Pablos's studio used proprietary tools from the French company Les films du Poisson Rouge and focused on organic, volumetric lighting and texturing, to avoid the look of "characters looking like stickers put on painted backgrounds."
- Klaus is the first original animated feature film to appear on Netflix, arriving on the service on 15 November 2019 after a limited theatrical run.
- The film is dedicated to animator and scene checker Mary Lescher, who worked on Klaus and died of cancer on 2 June 2019; she had also worked at Disney Animation and DisneyToon Studios from 1989 to 2006.
