After Santa bumps his head and comes to believing he is the superhero SuperKlaus, the Christmas caped crusader takes on a nasty businessman and it’s up to his elves to save the day in this Spanish animation. Providing the score is the ever-reliable Diego Navarro. Most years there seems to be a new lovely festive film score to join the collection, and it’s rarely from the big studios’ and streaming services’ offerings these days – last year it was Mark McKenzie’s Prancer: A Christmas Tale and this year it’s this. Navarro combines traditional (by which I mean Superman-like) comic book heroics with classic Christmas tunes in a delightful way to craft a magical seasonal offering.

The delightful heroic theme appears briefly in the opening cue before one of the score’s other facets, its rambunctious action music (there’s loads of it in the score’s second half – listen to “Life Size Action Figure” and “We Are Here to Rescue Santa” for a couple of great examples) shows up; then the Christmas classics appear in “Merry Christmas”. There’s a deliciously nasty theme for the villain in “Fafnir’s Theme” – full of menace and bah humbug. At times there is a sense of 1980s John Williams magic – the magical theme that opens “The Plan” before its slightly comical, “March of the Villains”-style conclusion. This is full-bodied, joyful orchestral music like they used to write – it’s always been obvious that Navarro is a master of technique and here he gets to combine that technique with great melody and it’s a real treat, from start to end. The constant playfulness is handled so well – it would be easy for it to become cloying, but it doesn’t – and by the time we get to the big rendition of the main theme for the end credits, we’ve heard not just one of the festive season’s, but one of the year’s most attractive film scores.

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