“I Lost My Body” and “Klaus”

Susan Granger’s reviews of “I Lost My Body” and “Klaus” (Netflix)

In these days preceding the Academy Awards, it’s fun to see the nominees and evaluate their chances of winning. Two animated entries are available only on Netflix: “I Lost My Body” and “Klaus”…and both won 2020 Annie Awards.

In French with English subtitles, “I Lost My Body” begins in a Parisian laboratory, where a severed hand decides to reconnect with its body. Its quest is to find an Algerian immigrant lad named Naoufel, who delivers pizzas and has fallen in love with Gabrielle, a librarian.

Based on Guillaume Laurant’s “Happy Hand,” it’s been seven years in production. According to director Jeremy Clapin, his goal is for viewers to forget they are watching an animation film by making the non-linear film structured as a puzzle.

Clapin describes his work as “an urban, modern fairy tale about destiny and resilience; it tells us that to change things, we must surprise ourselves, dare to do something unusual, stay away from the straight and narrow…The hand is really a tiny piece of you struggling with the bigger things around you. (It’s) destiny.”

Winning the Nespresso Grand Prize in the International Critics’ Week section of last year’s Cannes Film Festival – it’s the first animated film to claim that honor. And, since a record 32 animated entries were Oscar-qualified, to be among the chosen five is also quite an honor.

On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “I Lost My Body” is a skittering 6.

 

Set on a frozen island above the Arctic Circle, “Klaus” is a Santa Claus origin story, directed by “Despicable Me” co-creator Sergio Pablos and Carlos Martinez Lopez. It’s racked up seven nominations for the 2020 Annie Awards, including Best Animated Feature.

The story follows lazy, pampered Jesper (voice by Jason Schwartzmann), who is dispatched by his firm father, director of the Royal Postal Academy, to remote Smeerenburg to serve as its mailman. If he works hard, he’ll earn his inheritance. If not…

To his horror, Jesper discovers that Smeerenburg’s embittered residents don’t write letters. They’re too busy feuding and fighting, particularly the Krum and Ellingboe clans.

Eventually, Jesper teams up with Klaus (voiced by J.K. Simmons), a reclusive woodsman whose hobby is making toys. With no children of his own, he’s been storing them on shelves until Jesper, working with the schoolteacher Alva (voiced by Rashida Jones), has a gift-giving idea.

While Smeerenburg is a fictional village, Pablos did visit Norway’s Svalbard Island for research, which is how he learned about the culture of the Sami people. Young Margu is voiced by Neda M. Ladda, a Sami.

On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Klaus” is an engaging, revisionist 8, destined to become another Christmas classic.

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