Klaus (2019) is a 2D film: hand-drawn character animation finished with digital light, shadow and texture, plus some selected 3D elements. Its main characters were drawn, not built as 3D models, and it is not stop-motion. The solid, rounded look comes mostly from the way light was painted onto the drawings.
When Netflix announced its 2018 animation slate, it described Klaus as a 2D animated feature combining classical hand-drawn animation with cutting-edge digital technology. It added that the film’s world features volumetric lighting and texturing of the kind typically seen in CG animated films. That last phrase explains most of the “is it 3D?” question.
Three separate questions
“Is it 2D or 3D?” mixes up three questions that have different answers:
- How was the movement made? By drawing the characters.
- How were the surfaces shaded? With layered digital light, shadow and texture.
- How was the image put together? By combining those layers with backgrounds and some 3D elements.
A glossy or softly shaded result does not answer the first question by itself. It is the finished appearance, not a record of how the movement was created.
Why light makes a drawn shape look solid
As our own illustration, not a reconstruction of any Klaus shot, imagine a circle drawn on paper. On its own, the outline could be a flat disc or a ball. Add a darker edge on one side and a lighter area on the other, and it starts to read as a rounded object lit from one direction.
Now imagine the shape moving, stretching and turning from drawing to drawing. The light has to follow it convincingly. A shadow that stays still while the shape turns reads very differently from one that moves with the form. Doing that across every frame of a feature film is the problem Klaus’s team set out to solve.
What the Klaus artists actually did
Director Sergio Pablos described the process to befores & afters. The characters were drawn frame by frame in Toon Boom Harmony, with no puppet animation. Lighting used a tool called Klaus Light and Shadow, which combined production designer Marcin Jakubowski’s method with proprietary software from the French studio Les Films du Poisson Rouge.
Pablos credits Poisson Rouge with deriving tracking from the drawn lines themselves, so a light shape could follow a moving drawing. The studio’s own Klaus project page lists texturing as done there, and light and shadow as done with KLAS, its in-house technology.
The software vendor Foundry, in an explanatory blog post, gives the same order of work: the tool tracked the characters’ movements so light and shadow moved with them, and artists then refined the results by hand.
The production designers told Animation World Network that the lighting was split into separate components, such as direct light and shadow, ambient light, rim light and bounce light. Artists controlled each one, so the characters blend into their surroundings. Jakubowski compared the idea to painting in layers and then interpolating those layers so they move with the animation.
How the look was developed
Production designer Szymon Biernacki’s portfolio says he shared the role with Jakubowski. The pair spent a year on the film’s style and made a short proof-of-concept teaser to test Jakubowski’s approach to volumetric lighting on 2D characters.
In the SIGGRAPH blog’s interview with both designers, they say they did not want to rely on shaders or procedural treatment. Artists were meant to see the result directly as they worked, rather than pressing a render button and waiting.
That is the key distinction from a CG character film as the designers describe it. Klaus artists placed and shaped the light themselves, as painted layers on a drawing, and tracking helped carry those layers through the shot.
Where 3D was used
The production accounts do not claim that every element is 2D:
- Selected 3D elements: Pablos says some elements were made in Maya, and the reindeer were sometimes 3D and sometimes 2D.
- Painted 3D scenes: the SIGGRAPH interview says 3D scenes used pictures painted by a background artist and projected onto them, and that 3D props were given an illustrator’s look.
- Layouts and objects: Foundry’s post says 3D elements were used for scenic layouts and specific objects.
The accurate summary is drawn characters, digitally lit and textured, in a world that uses 3D where it helped, styled so that it does not stand out.
A cinema listing that says “3D” is about the screen, not the drawing
The BBFC record for Klaus lists both 2D and 3D cinema versions, each timed at 96 minutes 56 seconds, and rates the film PG for mild threat and violence. In classification records, a 3D version is one presented stereoscopically, watched with glasses. That label describes the screening format, not whether the animation was drawn or modelled.
Who made Klaus
Netflix’s 2018 announcement names Pablos as writer and director. It says his SPA Studios produced the film in Madrid with Atresmedia Cine, with Toon Boom as a technological partner.
The SIGGRAPH interview adds the scale: a team of more than 270 people from 22 countries, with freelance animators and outside studios helping with clean-up and ink and paint.
Three things to notice when you watch
Our suggestion, not a production checklist, is to pick one quiet shot and look at three things:
- The silhouette: the outer drawn shape of the character.
- The light inside it: the brighter and darker shapes, and how they change as the character turns.
- The scene: where the main light comes from and where it directs your attention.
Then watch normally. You do not need to name software to see that drawing and lighting are separate decisions.
Related reading
For a film whose finished surface prompts the opposite question, see whether Monster House is stop-motion.