Horst in Translation ([email protected])
"Ritter Rost - Eisenhart und voll verbeult" or just "Ritter Rost" is a German animated movie from 2013, so this one will have its 5th anniversary next year. It runs for 85 minutes almost, but this includes almost 10 minutes of end credits, so it is a pretty short film. I always find it somewhat shocking to see so many people credited as writers and directors and then the outcome is so weak, certainly too many cooks spoiling the broth. I already said that this was an animated movie we have here and Germany does not make these too often really (even if the tendency seems to be going up), so it does suck that when there is one once again to see that it is really nothing good, let alone special, at all.The premise here is on a little robot who sees himself as a mighty knight, but nobody else does really. When he surprisingly wins a tournament, he is accused of cheating and chased away. Other knight characters are robots too, so the reference between the fact that a robot is out of metal and so is a knight's armor is crucial for the overall idea. That's of course also true for the base material of this film. Now the film's biggest weakness is perhaps the animation. Sorry, but this is simply not enough for an animated movie from the 21st century. And it also left a negative impact on basically all other production values, including the story, which isn't bad, but also nothing special and a bit on the predictable side in terms of both good and bad guys. Finally, a word on the voice actors: it's all comedians. Kavanian, Herbst, Kebekus and Gerhardt are all famous comedians here in Germany and overall they are doing a solid job I'd say, easily one of the better components. The film as a whole gets a thumbs-down though and the title character's popularity baffles me a bit. This film was one of the potential German Oscar submissions back then (obviously did not get picked), there's video games, television series etc. and recently a sequel to this one came out too. Strange stuff. But I will only review this first film today and it did not get me curious about anything else. I suggest you don't watch it.
