Once the weather outside gets chilly, it’s easy to stumble onto any of countless animated Christmas movies on traditional television or streaming. There’s a whole army of these motion pictures, stretching from Mickey’s Once Upon a Christmas to modern installments in the canon like 2018’s The Grinch or The Star. December 2024 has even seen Netflix launch a new Richard Curtis-penned title That Christmas. Despite the ubiquity of these projects, only one Christmas movie has been nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar. This is partially due to the award only being introduced in 2002, thus ensuring a deluge of animated 20th-century Christmas cinema couldn’t compete for the prize.
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However, these Yuletide titles also just tend not to resonate with the Academy. There is one glaring exception to this phenomenon, however. At the 92nd Academy Awards, Klaus became the first animated Christmas film to score a Best Animated Feature Oscar nomination, a historic achievement on many levels. What led to this hand-drawn animated feature scoring Oscar glory that eluded other Christmas-themed animated features?
What Is Klaus?
Released to Netflix on November 8, 2019, Klaus is one of many features providing an origin story for the Santa Claus mythology, which feature follows cocky postman Jesper Johansen (Jason Schwartzman) getting sent to the crummy town of Smeerenburg. His access to his family’s fortune hangs over Johansen’s ability to establish a post office in this location. Here, Johansen encounters a hermit named Klaus (J.K. Simmons). The unlikely friendship between the duo ends up inspiring key facets of the Santa Claus legend, including the importance of both sending letters to the man with the giant white beard and exhibiting kindness to others.
Directed by Sergio Pablos (who also wrote the screenplay with Zack Lewis and Jim Mahoney), the hand-drawn animated Klaus was the first motion picture from Netflix Animation. Though far from the first animated feature Netflix distributed, for the company’s in-house animation division, Klaus was its own equivalent to Toy Story or Despicable Me. Though Netflix’s animated movie ambitions have dwindled in recent years, financing and releasing a new feature-length hand-drawn animated movie suggested rich potential for Netflix Animation. Maybe this division would nurture projects and mediums that other studios turned up their noses at.
Klaus scoring a Best Animated Feature Oscar nomination immediately elevated Netflix Animation’s profile, along with another Netflix animated film nominated in the same category that year, I Lost My Body. Suddenly, animated cinema from a streamer was standing alongside projects from Pixar and Laika. Meanwhile, this was also a rare 2010s Best Animated Feature nomination for English-language, hand-drawn animated cinema, alongside various Cartoon Saloon works. Klaus made history on many fronts, including breaking through as an animated Christmas movie in this category.
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It’s clear Klaus was a quietly momentous movie at the Academy Awards, but what’s not as clear is why on Earth other animated Christmas features didn’t make it into the Best Animated Feature Oscars category?
What Kept Other Animated Christmas Movies From Oscar Nominations
The Polar Express got snubbed for Best Animated Feature for Shark Tale, Shrek 2, and The Incredibles. A Christmas Carol got kicked out of Best Animated Feature in favor of five other movies, ditto Arthur Christmas two years later. What’s kept this animated subgenre from Oscar nominations? One thing keeping certain 2000s animated Christmas movies from Best Animated Feature Oscar nominees could be how Oscar voters feel about a very modern animation process. The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol, both from director Robert Zemeckis, were done in motion-capture animation. Over the years, there’s been rampant speculation that Oscar voters are just not fond of this technique, hence why non-Yuletide motion capture titles like The Adventures of Tintin failed to get Best Animated Feature nods as well.
There’s also the limited number of titles that could be nominated in the first decade of this category’s existence. Across eight of the first ten times the Oscars rewarded a Best Animated Feature Oscar, there could only be three nominees. This severely restricted what motion pictures could get nominated, thus ensuring acclaimed titles like Tangled, The Simpsons Movie, and A Scanner Darkly (among many others) got snubbed at the ceremony. That further ensured that animated Christmas movies had fewer opportunities to compete for Oscar glory.
Most importantly, though, most animated Christmas movies have simply not received the critical acclaim that can give them momentum to thrive during awards season. One or two beloved animated Christmas titles have been inexplicably snubbed, like Arthur Christmas. Others, like The Polar Express, Scrooge: A Christmas Carol, or The Star, received mixed-to-negative marks from critics in their initial release. 2018’s The Grinch, meanwhile, not only got the cold shoulder from critics but had to contend with how only one Illumination title (Despicable Me 2) has ever received a Best Animated Feature Oscar nomination.
Don’t expect That Christmas to join Klaus as another Christmas-themed Best Animated Feature Oscar nominee, given both its mixed reviews and the fact that it’s flying so far under the pop culture radar. Given how much the global film industry loves Christmas-themed cinema, it’s inevitable that someday another Yuletide feature will get nominated in this Oscar category.
For now, though, Klaus is the only animated Christmas movie deemed nice enough by the Academy to get a Best Animated Feature Oscar nomination.