This holiday season has offered a really limited slate of films, for reasons I don’t quite understand. It might be that the third Avatar movie was enough to scare off other films, or it might be that having given up on Christmas years ago (the surviving market being relegated to Hallmark and the lot) and giving up on understanding human behavior, Hollywood’s contented to just…give up. And we’ve basically lost all our Korean exhibitors, so the “seeing a Korean movie on Christmas Eve” tradition died before its tenth year.

Looking through the revivals, I saw two interesting possibilities. One was John Woo’s “Bullet in the Head” (35th anniversary). Tempting, but somewhat awkward to get to. The other, in a more accessible theater, was the 2019 movie Klaus—which I was shocked to see ranked #159 on IMDB’s top 250.

I have more than 250 issues with this list, but that aside—and very cautiously setting aside the Netflix brand name—I was surprised to see this relatively obscure film from Sergio Pablos’ Animagic Studios (best known for Descpicable Me, which Pablos created) on it. So off we went.

Well.

This is a very good movie. Would we put it in the top 250? No. Would we recommend it? Yes, absolutely. It is strongly reminiscent of the old Rankin-Bass TV specials (especially “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”) by way of Tarkovsky/McCracken. It also has no small measure of Miracle on 34th Street and Doc Hollywood.

The trailers leading up to this were just a barrage of truly awful-looking and identical-seeming animated features. This has to be partly due to the way these things are cut, because Goat, which is Stephen Curry’s allegorical film about a tiny goat wanting to play in the big leagues, looked better in this trailer. I had to look up that it was a Sony picture, though, otherwise I wouldn’t have known.

The once mighty Pixar has ripped off Avatar to make a beaver picture called Hoppers. I only remember this because it looked like every other flick and had the Pixar name on it. Klaus visually towers over every single one of these bland products.

Klaus is beautiful. This hits you before the tone of the film, and the tone of the movie hits hard and fast, as we see the Post Office Training Grounds where mail carriers endure a high-intensity boot camp designed to keep them in shape for delivery.

Jesper, our hero, is currently slacking on his PT. He’s the son of the Postmaster General and this is his last chance to straighten up and fly right. He figures he’ll blow it and go back to a life of luxury. Instead, he’s sent to Smeerensburg, a remote island village at the most desolate northern* end of the country.

This is the Doc Hollywood plot. (Or, if you like, you can trace it back to movies like F.W. Murnau’s City Girl, Preston Sturges’ Remember the Night, and many others.)  He’s given the task of getting 6,000 mails postmarked in a year. If he doesn’t, he’s cut off.

The opening narration, voiced by Jason Schwartzman as Jesper, gives us a whole “You know how Santa Claus works, but do you know how it all got started.” A la the Rankin-Bass specials.

The town of Smeerensburg is largely divided into two families: The Krums and the Ellingboes, who are at constant war with each other. Also, they’re illiterate. Jesper’s in a tight spot until he accidentally stumbles across the old toy maker, who (essentially) forces him to deliver a toy to one of the town’s children—said child being locked up in her house away from other children because of the feud.

So we touch on various aspects of the mythology: Why toys, how delivery, why reindeer, why flying, why coal, etc. etc. etc. This is all played across the backdrop of this family feud, itself an unending stream of sight gags. (The sight gags reminded me a lot of Tarkovsky/McCracken “Dexter’s Laboratory”/”Powerpuff Girls” stuff.)

Said backdrop, I can’t state enough, being absolutely gorgeous. Pablo Sergio had apparently been pondering “What if 3D animation had never been invented?” And then he applied all kinds of modern animation techniques to a traditional 2D film. The film does such a good job of showing the transformation of Smeerensburg from a haunted village to a happy place, just in the visuals.

Jesper’s love interest, Alva (Rashida Jones) came to Smeerensburg to teach, but has been stymied by the villagers worried that their children will end up consorting with children of the other family. When the children learn they can get toys by writing to Santa, they defy their parents and pursue education. As the children start behaving better, and start switching from pranks to being helpful—to the family they were previously tormenting—this creates an indebtedness that leads to a competitive kindness as fierce as their former feud was.

This is all done without any sly winking at the camera, without a bunch of adult references, and with only a handful of short pop-music interludes.

I presume you’re sitting down, but if not you might want to now: All of the characters in the movie are white. The black-haired Krums vs the red-haired Ellingboes and, out on the tundra separate from everyone else and only speaking Saami,  the blonde Lapps. The only sexuality on display is the sort of bog-standard heterosexuality of traditional children’s movies, where a boy and a girl get married and are shown in distant years with children.

I hate that I even have to notice these things. But it’s extraordinary today (and was in 2019). And, according to Pablos, Netflix only gave suggestions, not requirements.

It cost a mere $40M to make—did I mention it was beautiful?—and apparently got streamed over 30 million times in the first month.

Is it perfect? No. A very minor issue is that some of the jokes don’t land. The movie actually handles humor well by not trying to hammer in a joke or add a big take so you have plenty of time to appreciate that joke you didn’t like the first time. It typically just goes on to the next joke. A lot of Jesper’s humor is in a kind of modern, sarcastic, talk-a-lot style, which is a bit weak and way overdone these days.

The weakest part of the movie is the Doc Hollywood plot, in particular the second act low point, where Jesper’s treachery is revealed. The thing is, he really wasn’t very treacherous. He didn’t lie or even exaggerate much. Except for Alva and Klaus and the little Lapp girl, he doesn’t really form a lot of deep bonds. And even with Alva, the bond is mostly our presumption that this is the sort of movie where Alva and Jesper end up together.

But you know what? The movie kinda blows that off, too. Like “OK, here’s the downbeat we’re all expecting. No need to drag it out. Let’s get back to the jokes.”

We liked it a lot. I daresay more than we expected. I can easily see it fitting into the annual Christmas canon.

And to all a good night.

*Or possibly southern end. The country is never named and I initially thought of Tierra del Fuego, but there was an actual Smeerensburg in Norway.