Klaus

Year 12, Day 358 - 12/23/20 - Movie #3,699

BEFORE: If you look back almost 300 films ago, the last film I watched in 2019 was the 2017 CGI version of "The Grinch", and if I had a regret after watching that movie, it was that I realized too late that I could have linked from there to "Klaus".  Now, 300 films in a year is my arbitrary limit, sure, but if I had noticed the connection (Rashida Jones) between the two films earlier, I could have cut some middle film from a set of three somewhere in November or perhaps early December, and made room for "Klaus".  It didn't happen, it was too late, so I'm making up for it now.  What could have been film #3,300 at the end of 2019 is now film #3,699 at the end of 2020.  

That's fine, there are plenty of films that I managed to get to in 2020 that were rescheduled from 2019, just as there will be films watched in 2021 that I couldn't find room for in 2020, like "Hellboy", "New Mutants", "Bill and Ted Face the Music" and "Wonder Woman 1984".  Much of THAT next year will be fallout from the pandemic, of course, but some no doubt will be because I just plain ran out of slots.  Now, I'm also determined not to make the same mistake this year that I did last year, so please note that tomorrow's Christmas film was a last-minute addition, and like "Klaus", it sort of snuck up on me - I somehow forgot to include its cast list in my notes, so I very nearly omitted it.  But not quite, because in November I noticed the error, and I was in time to drop one film, let's say "A Million Little Pieces", in order to make room.  More on that tomorrow, but there is a certain symmetry, or perhaps rhythm, to my process. 

For now, Joan Cusack carries over from the tail end of "Instant Family".  

THE PLOT: When Smeerensburg's new postman, Jesper, befriends toymaker Klaus, their gifts melt an age-old feud and deliver a sleigh full of holiday traditions.  

AFTER: If you think about it, they really do sort of update the whole Santa Claus story every decade or so - many storytellers have taken it on, and some add to the story, while others detract.  If you go WAY back to the real Saint Nicholas and see how far removed that guy is from the fat guy in the red suit that talks to kids in shopping malls, you'll see what I mean.  To be fair, nobody really wrote anything about Saint Nicholas until hundreds of years after he died (same goes for Jesus, really) so it's honestly a blank slate.  He supposedly calmed a storm at sea, chopped down a tree possessed by a demon, spent some time in prison, and one legend even says he resurrected three children who had been chopped into pieces by a butcher.  But he was also known for his generosity, giving all his parents' wealth to the poor when they died and paying the dowries for unmarried women in order to prevent them from turning to prostitution - he would throw the coins through the window in the middle of the night, see?  He'd also put coins in shoes that were left out for him, a practice still celebrated on his feast day, December 6.

But then the legend of St. Nicholas got filtered through Dutch traditions, where he became known as Sinterklaas, depicted as an older bishop with white hair and a long beard, wearing a red bishop's robe.  He still arrives in the Netherlands on December 6 by boat, from his summer home in Spain (I swear, I'm not making this up, check Wiki if you don't believe me).  There's a big parade and some adults dress up like Sinterklaas's helper, Zwarte Piet ("Black Pete"") and they wear blackface to look like this Moor character, and they spank the naughty children in the crown with birch rods and the good children get chocolate coins thrown at them VERY HARD.  It all seems very racist, and straight out of the Middle Ages, but it still takes place today - again, Google "Zwarte Piet", I swear this is true.  

Eventually the Dutch settled in America ("even Old New York was once New Amsterdam") and some of the Dutch traditions came to America, and Sinterklaas slowly evolved into what we now know as Santa Claus, despite a push from Protestants to move the focus of Christmas away from the saint-based celebrations and back to the Christ child and the nativity.  Sinterklaas still persisted after the Revolutionary War in the Hudson Valley, and some attribute Washington Irving with a story in 1812 that had St. Nicholas soaring over treetops in a flying wagon.  By 1823 Clement Clarke Moore had published "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (aka "The Night Before Christmas") in the Sentinel in Troy, NY and many of the details of Santa's annual visit were firmly established.  That poem still holds up, once you explain to your kids what a nightcap, kerchief and sash are.  Illustrator Thomas Nast and "Wizard of Oz" author L. Frank Baum later weighed in with more details about Santa's look and daily routine.

From there, you can see how the depiction of Santa's workshop at the North Pole started to mirror American culture - after Henry Ford popularized the assembly line to make cars, it only made sense that elves would work on their own assembly line under Santa's guidance to make toys.  And while Coca-Cola didn't invent the concept, their ads in the 1930's certainly helped create Santa's image and mystique.  Songs like "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" by Gene Autry in 1949, and those Rankin-Bass stop-motion TV specials in the 1960's all kept adding details to Santa's story.  The big one I remember from when I was a kid was "The Year Without a Santa Claus", which threw Heat Meiser and Snow Meiser into the mix, plus Rudolph's own special added Yukon Cornelius, Hermey the elf and all those Misfit Toys...

Fast-forward a few more decades, and more modern depictions of Santa Claus probably have him using super-computers to maintain a giant database for that nice/naughty list, or using e-mail to take toy requests from kids.  But then there's "Klaus", which takes a giant step backwards, going back to a new origin story for Santa Klaus, but also at the same time moving forwards, because this story seems quite modern, even though it's set in the past.  The lead character is Jesper, who is a postman, so that sort of sets it squarely in the 1800's, I think.  Jesper's been stationed on a remote Northern island called Smeerensburg, where everyone's so caught up in a decades-old feud between two families that nobody takes the time to write letters to each other, the kids don't even go to school so the local teacher has to work as a fishmonger instead.  But Jesper is under orders from his father to post and process at least 6,000 letters, or he'll be cut off from the family fortune.  

When Jesper finds an old woodsman living way outside the main city, and he finds that the man has a gift for carving toys, he comes up with the idea to have the local kids write letters to Mr. Klaus, requesting specific toys.  Klaus insists on delivering them in person so he can see how happy the kids become upon getting a present, but since Jesper is skinnier than him, he throws Jesper up in the air and down the chimney to deliver the toys.  And when he reaches the home of the local bully, Jesper comes up with the idea of putting coal in the bully's stocking, to encourage better behavior in the future.  

But this update for the Santa story feels sort of reverse-engineered somehow, like the screenwriter knew where he wanted it to end, and then worked it back to have a completely different beginning.  I do like that most of the connection to religion has been removed here, instead Klaus is guided by the principle of paying it forward, that if you perform acts of kindness, they'll spark others. And time spent feuding is time wasted, which I think certainly resonates in our two-party political system.  The two feuding families here are united by their war on Klaus, and if you think about it, this is what SHOULD have happened when Democrats and Republicans were presented with a common enemy, the coronavirus, only that's not how it shook down, now, is it?  

There is great sadness in Klaus' back-story, he had a wife named Lydia and they were planning for children that never came, then Lydia got sick, and, well...you know.  There's another bit at the end that your kids might not be ready for, because Klaus is just a regular human, too - or is he?  Did he perhaps achieve mythical status that kept him alive much longer than a regular person?  I did think that it was very clever that Jesper basically created the legend of Santa Claus in order to sell stamps, which rings a little close to reality, where he was created to sell Coca-Cola and, well, everything else we all give each other for Christmas.  If Santa Claus didn't already exist, somebody would have had to create him to save the U.S. economy in the fourth quarter every year. (Voltaire once said something similar about God, but I'm paraphrasing here.)

I didn't really follow some of the stuff with the Sami people, who speak a different language than the other characters.  But I'm going to go easy on today's film because the director, Sergio Pablos, was very nice to our Kickstarter campaign.  No naughty list for him this year.  The look of the film is a major selling point, at a time when nearly everything is CGI, it's great to see a studio say, "Well, it doesn't HAVE to be that way, what if animation could look more organic and traditional, hand-crafted even" - which of course, seems very appropriate for a story set back in the late 1800's or perhaps early 1900's.  

Well, there's just one film left to watch in 2020, so I'm going to go get to it.  What will it be?  HINT: It's a Christmas film, and two actors carry over from this one to that one.

Also starring the voices of Jason Schwartzman (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Rashida Jones (last heard in "Spies in Disguise"), J.K. Simmons (last seen in "Father Figures"), Will Sasso (last seen in "Killing Hasselhoff"), Norm MacDonald (last seen in "The Ridiculous 6"), Sergio Pablos, Neda Margrethe Labba, Reiulf Aleksandersen, Sara Margrethe Oksai, Kendall Joy Hall, and cameos from Sam McMurray (last seen in "Jenny's Wedding"), Dwight Schultz (last heard in "Batman: Under the Red Hood")

RATING: 7 out of 10 bird feeders