This review based on a DVD provided by the lovely people at Diabolik.
While it is safe to say that Terkel I Knibe is not about to win any awards for its animation – it's not horrible but nobody will ever mistake its bandy legged, plastic faced characters for Pixar creations – it is equally safe to say that creator Anders Mattheson isn't really aiming for the Disney set anyway. When your big, romantic musical number is titled “Fuck Off, You're Too Ugly For Me And Your Mother Does It With Horses” … well, that pretty much tells you everything you need to know, doesn't it? Terkel I Knibe is crudely animated, even more crudely written, and frequently laugh out loud funny.
Terkel is twelve and, as is the case for most twelve year olds, the world is a strange and hostile place. His mother is a neurotic, hypochondriac chain smoker; his father a mono syllabic non-communicator whose face is always buried in the newspaper. His younger sister wants to play dolls; Uncle Stewart is a raging, violent drunk who mans the local Kid's Help Phone. His best friend, Jason, is a foul mouthed kid from the wrong side of the tracks who always carries a length of pipe with him because “You never know when you'll need an iron pipe.” Truer words have seldom been spoken.
In the early going Terkel is a film that mines the casual cruelty of youth to great comic effect. Terkel's young sister exists only to be spurned and casually damaged, the requisite school bullies ambush Terkel with water guns in the bathroom hoping to make him appear to have pissed himself with the end result that he actually does, hormonal twelve year old girls throw themselves at the new supply teacher, things of that nature. But before long things escalate wildly out of control, Terkel acquires an unknown enemy, and the blood begins to flow freely and copiously.
Juvenile is a word often attached to films as a negative, but in this case it is achingly appropriate. Terkel I Knibe is the product of a fevered mind, one frighteningly in touch with what makes the pubescent mind tick. It's as though Mattheson has stepped back into his own childhood and created the film that would have made him laugh the hardest as a twelve year old rather than the film that his parents wish would have made him laugh. It is enormously vulgar, yes, but also endlessly creative, shocking, and frequently disturbingly accurate in how it captures the fickle, capricious nature of adolescence. When Terkel is pressured into stealing beer for the school bullies it could very easily have been lifted from my own adolescence. When drunken Uncle Stewart catches him doing it and lays a beating on the young goons, that's entertainment.
Available on Danish DVD, Terkel I Knibe comes with a strong anamorphic transfer – which you'd expect from a digitally sourced film – and excellent English subtitles on the main feature. Unfortunately there are no subtitles on any of the special features.
I remember very clearly the day when, as a child, my sister and I learned the word ‘fuck' and learned simultaneously that we were never to say it. I also remember that the very next morning we literally skipped down the sidewalk to school singing it out as loud as we could, endlessly entertained by the fact we were doing something we shouldn't. That's exactly the sort of film Terkel is. There's absolutely zero in the way of subtlety but it's loaded with the distinctly adolescent energy that comes from misbehaving. It's a bit short and an over reliance on a fairly irritating and unnecessary narrator keeps it from being a classic, but on the whole Terkel is great fun.