The 92nd Oscars will be on Sunday (Monday morning, Feb. 10, in Manila) and many Oscar-watchers are one in thinking that the awards are pretty much locked and sealed in the major categories, however, there are still contests that are pretty much up for grabs, including the race for the Best Animated Feature of the year.
Klaus, the first original animated film produced by Netflix, was the surprise nominee when the Oscar nominations were announced last month. The film, launched in November, had a quiet start in the awards race and did not receive nominations from the early award-giving groups.
However, after receiving some of the best reviews of the year, Klaus slowly and steadily built its buzz and started getting momentum when it received seven Annie Awards including Best Animated Feature of the year. Last weekend, the BAFTAs selected Klaus as the Best Animated Film of the year against perceived frontrunners Toy Story 4 and Missing Link.
Written and directed by Sergio Pablos (Despicable Me), Klaus was praised by critics and audiences for its traditional but innovative animation style, its timeless and heartwarming story, and the vocal performances of its voice cast led by Jason Schwartzman (who voiced Jesper), J. K. Simmons (Klaus) and Rashida Jones (Alva.)
Klaus tells the story of Jesper, a rich and spoiled kid whose poor performance as a student at the postal academy gets him “banished” to a job at a remote frozen island of Smeerensburg above the Arctic Circle inhabited by hostile people who have been feuding with each other for years. When he reaches the town, Jesper finds an ally in local teacher Alva and befriends a mysterious carpenter named Klaus who lives alone in a cabin full of handmade toys. Their unlikely friendship brings laughter back to the town, forging a new legacy of generous neighbors, magical traditions and people caring and looking after each other.
In early November, The STAR had an exclusive interview with Jason in Beverly Hills. We started the interview by determining how the title is pronounced before we eventually agreed on one.
“I’d say Klaus (sounds like house) but I’ve heard it pronounced differently and my reaction is not to say, ‘Excuse me, it’s actually pronounced Klaus,’ my instinct is to say, ‘Oh, I’ve been saying it wrong this whole time,’” Jason said.
This is not the first animated film that the acclaimed actor has worked on. He previously appeared in Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs. Both are award-winning films with an experimental approach to animation that further cemented Jason’s eclectic body of work.
When this writer brought up his impressive resume, he struggled a little bit and was unable to express what he wanted to say right away. “That would be the first question, if I could ask and sit down with actors, I would ask, ‘How do you pick your movies?’ That’s what I would want to know.”
“Speaking as a fan of other actors whose body of work I really admire, I always think, ‘You can’t know how it’s going to turn out’ because it’s such a collaborative job and by and large, it takes a good amount of time to make any movie and it goes through so many processes that how can you know what it’s going to be? It just goes through so many other things before it becomes a movie you see.”
In Klaus, which uses traditional hand-drawn animation but reinvents the story of the legend of Santa Claus, Jason enjoyed the longer process of filmmaking while constantly rediscovering his character over several recording sessions.
It was Rashida who encouraged him to do the film. “Rashida Jones said to me, ‘I’m working on this film and they need a person to play this character,’” he recalled.
He read an early draft of the script and loved the practical reason why there were so much magic in the story.
Jason recalled a meeting he had with the director and he had a question about a scene his character Jesper was in. Sergio, who couldn’t speak English that well, took out a sketchbook instead and illustrated the scene for him. “Just that moment, I said, ‘Okay, I will make the movie. This is a storyteller.’”
Klaus tells the journey of Jesper from a world of want to a world of need and its real world implications couldn’t be more powerful. It is told in the simplest way possible so that it’s accessible for kids without limiting its appeal to adults.
“I watched it with my daughter who’s eight. When she watched it, she was very focused on it and didn’t really laugh out loud and I was, like, ‘Gosh, this is unusual for me’ because I watched a lot of movies with her, the movies are loud, bombastic, tons of singing and the kids are distracted and talking to you. It was the first time I watched a movie with her and she wasn’t distracted from the movie.”
Jason was unsure how her daughter, who doesn’t know that he’s an actor, was reacting to the movie until he saw her crying at the end.
“’Oh, I loved it!’” he recalled her daughter telling him in tears. “I realized it was like a taste of an adult movie but for a kid because the interaction between the child and the movie was more direct.”
“You just reach out. To me, that’s the biggest takeaway from the movie. Curiosity and interest in the world around you and other people will open up and make other people curious about you and we all can teach each other something.”
Stream Klaus now on Netflix so you can confidently applaud when the Oscars name it the Best Animated Feature of the year.