2D hand paints 3D effect! Netflix’s first animated film “Klaus”

Netflix’s first animated feature film, “Klaus: the Secret of Christmas”, is in theatres!

“Klaus” is a holiday comedy cartoon. It is directed by “Despicable Me” co-creator Sergio Pablo and co-starred Joan Cusack, Will Sasso and Norman MacDonald. The word of mouth on IMDB at present is very good!

Behind the creator

Sergio Pablos

It shows that hand-drawn animation can reach the requirement of 3D animation.

Sergio Pablos was one of Disney’s great animators of the 1990s, producing famous animated films such as “Notre Dame DE Paris”, “Tarzan” and “Hercules”.

“Hercules” and ” Tarzan”

After hand-drawn animation collapsed in the native American animation industry, he brought the technology back to his native country, Spain, and started his own animation company, Animagic (SPA Studios).

Sergio Pablos is the head and artistic director of The SPA Studios, a small animation company started with no more than 10 people but has involved in early art and motion testing for many large international projects.

Best known for developing the ideas, settings, and storyboards of  “Despicable Me”:

Other productions include “Rio”, “Silver Island” and “Tarzan”.

He learned two things: visually, hand-drawn animation should surpass the past, should not indulge in nostalgic style, should look for the respective advantages of hand drawn and CGI and combine them; in terms of content, have to find topics which can show the strengths of hand-drawn animation.  And based on these two, “Klaus” was born.

Sergio Pablos said: “after years of studying and working on CGI projects, it has been a great joy and satisfaction to watch “Despicable Me” from its inception to where it is today.

What they want to do is to use software technology to overcome some of the limitations of hand-drawn animation technology. They focused on volume, lighting and texture. The result was something like a CG animation, which was actually an unexpected side effect. Their ultimate goal was to develop a tool that would allow them to bring anything visual to the screen. Because most animated movies seem so standardized, they hope to overcome this mindset.

In terms of production cost, the standard 2D production line is much simple than the mainstream CG animation process.

Despite the popularity of mainstream CG technology, there are still some who insist on their own artistic style and continuously improving. Starting from a team of two, and with assistance from Netflix, the total number of workforce participated exceed 700.  It also has encouraged an abundant number of young people to get back into the great 2D animal world.

Director Sergio Pablos hopes “Klaus ” will first be an attractive story for the audiences.  Instead, he does not prefer people to support the film simply because it is a 2D made 3D production.  After creating “Klaus”, he believes more people will choose to go into 2D animation in the future.  He hopes to keep making more 2D films, and perhaps the technique will become popular again.

Source: Animated Human Space

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