Dirs. Kresten Vestbjerg Andersen/Thorbjorn Christoffersen/Stefan Fjeldmakr, Denmark, 2006, 78 mins
Cast (voices): Bill Bailey, Ben Bishop, Olivia Colman, Adrian Edmondson, Toby Stephens, Johnny Vegas
Review by Sian Thatcher
While Europe is one continent and we move ever nearer to being one nation through the EU, whatever similarities we all share, we can’t deny that there are some wide chasms of cultural difference.
The Eurovision Song Contest highlights this well, illustrating, as it does, the UK’s penchant for irony and humour (well, I hope that was the point of last year’s entry), and each country’s individual style, culminating in the pinnacle of weird - the bizarre, yet oddly fascinating Loki, winners of the most recent contest, and one of Scandinavia’s finest, the rock monsters of Finland.
Terkel in Trouble appears to be another case in point – a perfect illustration of European differences. This CG animation was a massive box office record-breaker and award-winner in its native Denmark, and audiences loved the vocal talents of popular stand-up comedian Anders Matthesen, who did all the voices in the Danish version and wrote the original radio play. It has now been re-voiced for the UK by the likes of Adrian Edmondson, Bill Bailey and Johnny Vegas.
The film tells the story of bullied teenager Terkel (Edmondson), whose parents are distant, his uncle (Vegas) a violent alcoholic and his best friend isn’t talking to him. When Fat Doris shows him some affection, he denigrates her to curry favour with the bullies – and she promptly commits suicide. After that, it becomes clear that someone is trying to kill him…
The animation is different to what Pixar and DreamWorks have set as the benchmark, but it is still fairly slick. And they evoke the feeling of isolation and fear after being bullied very well through jerky camera shots and the jumpy soundtrack.
The problem arises when they add South Park-style humour into the equation, and you realise that the UK and the Danes really aren’t on the same page. While South Park is a clever satire of modern living, it does use lots of profanity and schoolboy humour, but it’s not just about obscenity.
Terkel in Trouble, on the other hand, seems to focus on the profanity. It consists of a vague, rambling narrative, which begins to look at bullying and then drifts off into a psycho thriller, and it is interspersed with random acts of violence, which are (without wishing to sound like Mary Whitehouse) not only unnecessary, but unfunny, completely irrelevant to the plot and rather graphic – for an animation.
The characters are also disappointing; they are one-dimensional in personality and are generally unlikeable. The father literally only says the word ‘no’ behind a newspaper throughout the film, the mother (Colman) always has a cigarette hanging out of her mouth and is made to look repulsive, and the best friend talks ‘street’, which is actually code for just ‘annoying’.
The whole film is extremely odd. Maybe it’s a Danish thing, or maybe schoolboys will enjoy it - I can’t imagine who else will.
As the Eurovision Song Contest proved, us Europeans are all different. But at the same time, maybe some things are better left in Scandinavia.
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