‘Klaus’ Director Sergio Pablos Offers Optimistic Update On His Stunning Hand-Drawn Feature ‘Ember’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Oscar-nominated Klaus director and Despicable Me creator Sergio Pablos took the stage at Cartoon Springboard in Madrid this week to offer an enlightening update on Ember, a long-shelved passion project that Netflix canceled in 2022, along with several other high-profile projects, during a major management shift.

Pablos also gave Cartoon Brew exclusive access to a previously unreleased image from the project. We wish we could show you more, but everything shown in the room is still highly confidential.

Pablos made clear that Ember is anything but dead. “We’ve spent the last two years continuing to work on it whenever possible,” he told the crowd. “We’re now at the brink of hopefully making a serious play to bring it back into production.”

During the presentation, Pablos revealed an astonishingly polished project: lush environments, SPA Studios’ brilliant 2D lighting techniques, and emotional story beats that show off just how far into development the film was when Netflix doused the spark of the project.

“There’s so much work that has gone into this thing already,” Pablos said. “I just wanted to bring you a sneak peek and get a sense of your reaction.”

A Prehistoric Flame

Set millions of years ago among early human ancestors, Ember follows a prehistoric tribe that depends on a single flame to survive. When that flame is lost, a young girl and her father are thrust into an epic quest to reclaim fire.

The scope of the project is breathtaking. Pablos showed a map of the terrain that his primates have to cross, and it looked like something drawn by Tolkien. “The world-building in Klaus was just a small town. This time, it’s a whole continent, so we had a lot of work to do,” he explained.

Pablos described the film’s origins as stemming from his fascination with the book and 1980s live-action feature Quest for Fire and the idea of “the future of humanity depending on this small, flickering flame that could go out at any minute.” Rather than retelling the original, adult-oriented story, Ember reimagines the concept as a family adventure set “at the dawn of humankind,” blending meticulous paleo-research with the stylized, hand-crafted aesthetic that defined Klaus, with a slightly more mature look and plot.

The SPA Studios team consulted anthropologists, studied fossil records, and even learned primitive fire-making techniques at Spain’s Atapuerca archaeological site. “We went to the Museum of Human Evolution in Burgos, invited paleontologists to give lectures — probably too many,” Pablos joked. “We had to know exactly what that place would look like, what kind of fauna populated it.”

From Netflix’s Ashes

Netflix had greenlit Ember after the Oscar-nominated success of Klaus, but the project was caught in a flood of internal restructuring that wiped out several animated features in development.

Fortunately, Pablos retained the Ember IP and, rather than abandoning it, he kept refining the project. The Cartoon Springboard presentation featured extensive test footage, animation studies, and nearly finalized sequences showing how SPA Studios’ proprietary tools and techniques — the same pipeline that powered Klaus — would evolve for the new film. Some of those tools are even available now to animators who use Blender.

“We were developing Ember in Grease Pencil for Blender,” Pablos said. “Our goal was to put a free 2D animation tool out there that you would choose even over the other paid options.” The team had reached an advanced prototype when Netflix pulled the plug. “We got canceled before we finished, so we published the version that we had. It’s still out there,” he explained, although it may take a bit of digging to find.

Primed to Catch Fire

From what was shown, Ember is not an early-stage pitch; it’s a full, Hollywood-caliber feature, packaged and ready to head into production with the right backing. The characters’ visual language is fully defined, the story is polished, the worldbuilding — a prehistoric Africa populated by extinct megaflora and fauna — looks immense and tangible, and full, minutes-long sequences are ready to be animated.

Even with this level of polish, Pablos admitted that finding a new home for an original animated feature in today’s market is a steep climb, especially one as ambitious as Ember. According to the director, the critique he hears most often is that studios are only interested in existing IPs. “Now, if it’s not based on something else, they don’t even want to hear about it. That’s the obstacle right now,” he elaborated.

Still, Pablos remains undeterred. “We have several potential distributors and investors in negotiation,” he confirmed. “There’s not a production plan yet, but I’m optimistic. There’s more than one suitor, so it seems like it could happen.”

In the meantime, to keep the project alive in conversations, Pablos has strategically rebranded Ember for potential partners as “a new take on Quest for Fire,” citing the original novel as a touchpoint. “The moment we did that, sadly, people were interested because it’s no longer a brand-new thing,” he said with a wry smile familiar to anyone who knows the man. “Just to get to the next conversation, you have to do that.”

A Spark That Endures

Like its undersized heroine’s quest to protect a fragile flame, Ember itself has become a story of persistence. The clips shown in Madrid, some humorous, some haunting, revealed a project full of heart, hard work, and scope. It is unmistakably grand in its ambition.

During a post-presentation audience Q&A, Pablos ended his talk on a note of realism and encouragement for the young animators in the room: “Hollywood was always in flames,” he said, using an appropriate enough analogy. “It’s never going to be perfect. Those who succeed find a path through the madness. So don’t externalize the problem. Keep fighting, keep doing it yourself.”