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KLAUS (2019);

Directed and ideated by Sergio Pablos; Written by Sergio Pablos, Zach Lewis, Jim Mahoney; Produced by Netflix;

Klaus is an animated film on the origin of Santa Klaus. The protagonist, Jesper, is a postman, sent by his father in the faraway city of Smeerensburg, as a punishment for his egoistic behavior. He will invent the legend of Santa Klaus, fix the city (without even knowing what he's doing), he will change and grow up, finding friends and a family. If you've seen the movie, yes, I agree with you: Jesper is a really accurate version of a Nordic modern Zuco (The Emperor’s New Groove, 2000).

Okay, but why is Klaus so amazing? Why has it been nominated for Best Animated Feature this year at the Oscars and why did it win BAFTA Best Animated Film? There are a lot of reasons, but the most significant is the innovative way of interaction between characters/props and lights and shadows, something that took Sergio Pablos and the production almost ten years to come up with.

This film really looks like a 3D animation when it’s just a traditional 2D animation frame by frame. The team achieved this incredible look animating the lights and the shadows as if they were working on a 3D animation, studying how the L&S would hit the characters and the props and how they would change. They created a new software for this work, KlaS, that gave the lights/shadows department's animators the possibility of drawing lights and shadows on different layers and tracking them on a specific part of a scene; the animators would tell the algorithm how the lights and the shadows should be affected by the characters’ movements, then the algorithm would do all the work. But yeah, this tracking thing wasn't that accurate, so the animators had to adjust lights and shadows nearly every frame to actually make everything work.

That concerned also the texture's changes and, in this film, there were really a lot of different textures: they used them nearly on every part of every scene, sometimes they are more visible, sometimes less. For example, they used textures for the eyes, to give them that glassy look, and the fog is a texture as well (if you have seen the film, you know that it's usually very foggy). So, the software works in different ways depending on whether or not the lights and shadows are cast on a texture, changing again on the type of texture used.

In conclusion, the average plot is highly supported and elevated by an innovative look: something that merges together 2D animation and 3D animation. If you are interested in animation, if you like drawing or if you just like the cinema, this is a film that you have to watch.

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Spirit Messenger Jesper

I already saw some designs for this AU where Kluas and Jesper are part of "Rise of the Gaurdians" and since I loved the idea of Kluas being like an origin story for North I just had to make my own design for Jesper!

Lots of different inspirations was put into the design that's a bit too much to explain all here but all in all Jesper is basically the Royal Messenger of the MiM and also has a flock of messenger pigeons to help him out when needed.