I watched this movie back in October for the first time ever and loved it!! So I thought I’d give it another go but this time analyse it a little further, just for my understanding of the concept, the characters and story line!
The performances and the acting of every single character in Klaus is absolutely breathtaking! Everything down to the minute facial expressions looks so real -almost as if the characters were real people and not just animated drawings. The character design just speaks for itself!
I was watching this video about the character design process for Klaus and I noticed that they use very simple basic shapes and then build the characters on top! For instance, Klaus’s basic shape is a block and Torsten Schrank (lead character designer) mentioned that he wanted Klaus to be big and strong, but also feel secure.
Jesper on the other hand is made up of triangles; which are usually associated in cliche of being the go to for designing villains; but here it just shows his unreliable personality that is made evident in the beginning of this film. Although, there are points within the film where he seems to be sly – when he warns the kids about being naughty and bribes some kids with the prospect of getting toys.
Circular shapes usually denote someone being friendly and cheerful, but in this film, although Magdalone and Olaf have round base shapes, they have the opposite of being villainous and unfriendly, even slightly malicious.
I found this article by Disney that explains this well: https://www.waltdisney.org/sites/default/files/2020-04/T%26T_ShapeLang_v9.pdf
Found another useful site that I’ll pop in here for future reference: https://www.cia.edu/blog/2014/11/quick-tips-for-character-design
This took me back to Bianca Ansem’s character design workshop, where she spoke to us about the use of shapes and strong silhouettes and how these can affect the way the audience perceives a character and their personality.
There are a lot of characters in this film that undergo massive changes to their personalities except for a few like the heads of the Krum and Ellingboe family. The main characters that we see evolving are Jesper of course, Alva and Klaus.
With Jesper, it is pretty well established that he is a well privileged and pampered guy with absolutely no purpose to do anything in life than laze around from his body language and facial expressions. His clothes and their colour speak volumes of his mood and personality. For instance at the beginning he is dressed in white silk clothes with gold borders, but as his father threatens to disown him and forces him into his postman uniform, the colours are darker and greyer and desaturated.
He also has this very laid back and casual personality. He is comfortable being rich and this comfort is challenged when he is suddenly sent off to Smeerensburg to become a postman. This earmarks the development of his character and as the story progresses we see his personality change into the complete opposite of what he was. He now has purpose and that is cleverly denoted with the character coming into the light more often.
I think Klaus’ personality evolves from him saying absolutely nothing to being completely open and loving towards the end of the film. Although Klaus is primarily depicted as big and a little scary, we eventually warm up to him. He doesn’t say much and I think the phrase ‘actions speak louder than words’ is justified here. We see his first act of kindness when he makes these little bird houses, which is juxtaposed well with the previous action of him tightening the noose and holding a sickle. I suppose this was the director’s way of confusing the audience and then surprising them with the complete opposite action.
With Alva (the teacher), I absolutely love this character because she is so bold and straight up about everything and it comes through so well with the first establishing shot of her performance! She seems a little spooky and malicious with all this fish around her, but we find out just a second later within the same shot that she wasn’t always like that. She takes comfort in the fact that she doesn’t have long left in that sad town, but then is challenged when Jesper sends a few kids to school. We then see a complete change in her perspective and she evolves into this loving teacher that she has actually been all along. Like I mentioned with Jesper above, Alva’s character change is also reflected in her clothes – she comes more into the light and she isn’t lit with the stark lighting that we see at the beginning.
Researching these videos and learning more about this film is really helping me understand a lot about the importance of acting things out as a reference. I also noticed the use of timing charts in their test shots and its really lovely to see how they break down each shot. I’m also trying to use this movie as a reference to learn timing, because it is absolutely impeccable and I just love it! The performances just give so much more to the character and I hope that one day I can animate like this! I love that the film is actually 2D but has this very ethereal 3D vibe to it!! I found out that actually some objects like the carriages and carts are 3D models, but they blend them in so well that it looks as though its all part of one world! 😀
Overall, I absolutely love this film!! Everything in it right from backgrounds to characters is gorgeous 😀 The only thing that I sometimes found a little weird were a few extreme close ups of just the eyes, which were done really well but did feel a little unsettling. The only other thing that I found slightly unnecessary maybe was the song about the postman, which just suddenly turned up out of nowhere. Other than that, I think this is a great animation film!!