Klaus

Sergio Pablos's Klaus launched on Netflix in November 2019 and won the BAFTA for Best Animated Film, the Annie Award for Best Animated Feature (Independent), and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The film consolidated Pablos, a former Disney animator (Tarzan, Hercules, Treasure Planet), as a major independent-animation director. The film was Netflix's first traditional 2D-animated feature, made through the Spanish independent studio The SPA Studios using a custom hand-drawn shading process.

Jesper (voiced by Jason Schwartzman), a selfish, lazy young postal-academy graduate, is banished by his postmaster-general father to the miserable Arctic-Circle island town of Smeerensburg, a fictional outpost where the dysfunctional residents have been mutually hostile for centuries. Jesper, ordered to deliver six thousand letters in his first year on pain of being formally cut off from his family fortune, accidentally encounters the reclusive woodcarver Klaus (J.K. Simmons), who lives alone in the forest with a workshop full of unsold toys. Their unlikely partnership generates an explanation, in fictional-folk-tale form, of the broader Santa Claus myth. Rashida Jones plays the local schoolteacher Alva.

The film's hand-drawn 2D animation (using a custom proprietary shading-and-light algorithm The SPA Studios developed in-house) produced one of the most technically distinctive animated features in recent years, particularly notable for its commitment to traditional rather than CGI methods. The film's sustained warm-hearted register and its central friendship made it a continuing-popular Netflix family-watch on streaming.