Horst in Translation ([email protected])
"Der kleine Ritter Trenk" or "Trenk, the Little Knight" is a German animated movie released in 2015, so still fairly recently. For writer Gerrit Hermans it was the second full feature film and he has been really prolific in recent years, has a new film in theaters too these days. Lots of live action stuff in his films, but all these include animated characters too to some extent. The director is Anthony Power and as you may have guessed from the title already he has worked on international projects too and enjoyed a pretty long career in the industry until now. And their collaboration here may have resulted in a contender for best career work I think. It may not be a great movie, but it is fun to watch the characters from start to finish and we also get some funny quotes and decent interactions. And the best thing is that this film exactly has what you would expect from a knight-themed medieval movie with kings, dragons, damsels in distress and honestly a pretty nice message on gender equality that is charmingly delivered here. No surprise that established actors like Prahl and Zeiler wanted to be a part of this. So yeah, it is pretty enjoyable overall. Animation is fine too and the positive here is all in all certainly far mor frequent than the negative, especially as the latter is basically non-existent. I recommend this one to everybody who likes animation, also outside Germany, to the young and the young at heart. I'd have watched it perhaps in a theater too if it had played anywhere near me back then, but I think it didn't. So yeah, see this one. A simple story (with a nice Prince/Pauper reference) executed nicely.