Western Animation / Terkel in Trouble

You think life is hard? Be lucky you aren’t poor Terkel. ^note Clockwise from top left to bottom left: Fat Doris, Uncle Stewart, Sten, Saki, Jason, Terkel, and Rita. Not pictured: Arne, Gunnar, and Joanna.

Terkel: Is it completely impossible to get any help?
Einar: Yes, that's right, little Terkel! Remember that if the outhouse burns down! Take care, and tell your father one of these days I will show up and beat him up!

Terkel In Trouble (Terkel i knibe) is Denmark's very first all-CG animated feature. Terkel is a sixth-grader who lives with a dysfunctional family, and other townspeople are no better, from his foul-mouthed best friend, Jason, who always carries an iron pipe around, to resident school bullies Sten and Saki.

One day Terkel starts receiving death threats. Could they be from Sten and Saki, who were mercilessly beaten by Terkel's abusive, alcoholic uncle, Stewart? Or from Jason, whose fat and ugly sister Doris committed suicide after being rejected and mocked by Terkel, who didn't know she and Jason were siblings?

Terkel In Trouble features a cast of mostly kids, provides dark and cynical humour, as well as unpleasant character designs, and thus is often compared with South Park; however, Terkel is less satirical and far less surreal than South Park.

The film is based on a radio show created by comedian Anders Matthesen, who does all voice acting for both the radio show and the film. It shares a universe with Checkered Ninja from 2018.

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The film provides examples of:

• Adults Are Useless: All adults in Terkel's life — except for Gunnar, who is actively trying to kill him — are either completely oblivious to or just plain doesn't care about his plight.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Played straight and later gender inverted. Johanna likes Jason, who doesn't fall for her until she tells him to "Fuck off and die".
• Amazing Technicolor Population: For some reason Saki has greenish skin.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: Because Doris was the most unpopular student on the school, her gory suicide is treated as a joke by everyone, even the school's staff, who only conduct a very token investigation of it. Even her brother, Jason, is only slightly affected by her death for a brief moment before going back to business as usual, and even then, he really just seemed mildly annoyed at what happened.
• Animated Actors: The scenes during the end credits show that the characters are just actors playing a part, even if it seems that someone takes this too seriously... Most of them are also Playing Against Type. This aspect is taken to ridiculous extremes with Terkel's father. His entire gag is that he can't say anything other than "No," but he keeps saying "Yes" instead during the outtake. Even when they put a sign with the word "No" inside his newspaper, he lets out a pained "Maybe"?
  • Jason is shown as a pretentious arthouse theatre actor while Silas is shown as foul-mouthed and borderline insane.
    • Stewart notably averts this, being shown as just as crazy as his "character" (and he actually starts up by auditioning for the minor role of the priest first).
• Animated Adaptation: Of a long-running radio drama/comedy
• Big Guy, Little Guy: Sten and Saki. Saki is the big guy and Sten's flunkey. Sten is the small guy and the leader of the duo.
• Art Shift: Gunnar's song about a poor Thai boy is visualized in a "paper cut-out" style vaguely reminiscent of South Park.
• Brick Joke: When Gunnar is introduced and points out that Terkel sat on a spider, the latter says that it's no big deal since he could just wash his jeans. After Gunnar's and Lise-Lotte's deaths, the latter is smeared out on Terkel's pants, and when Jason points it out, Terkel says the same thing.
• Camera Abuse: Terkel at point gets shocked by a strange noise while standing at a urinal in the school bathroom. This results in him involuntary pissing on the camera.
• Canon Immigrant: Stewart Stardust, Terkel's uncle, was a character created by comedian Anders Matthesen several years before this film.
• Character Narrator: Arne. He's also the music teacher and appears as many other bit roles, always addressing the audience.
• Chekhov's Gun: You never know when you get use of a nice lead pipe.
• Comically Missing the Point: Combined with Dramatically Missing the Point. In the Hilarious Outtakes, Beate treats her audition like a job interview, and explains to the director what she thinks she would bring to the role. This leads to her going off on a tangent about all the hidden dangers a young boy could encounter, and accidentally proves she'd be perfect for the role.
  Beate: I think I would play a good mother who helps Terkel through all his problems. It's not small stuff a young boy could run across. From ingrown toenails on the knees to pulling a muscle in the cornea.
• Commander Contrarian: Played for Laughs with Terkel's dad, who is unable to say anything at all but "no", even at his wedding... For the 2nd time nevertheless.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Gunnar wants to kill Terkel because he sat upon a spider, squashing it.
• Dub Name Change:
  • The British English dub renames a lot of the characters to more English sounding names:
    • Arne is renamed Barry.
    • Sten is renamed Nigel.
    • Beate is renamed Sheila.
    • Rita is renamed Fiona.
    • Gunnar is renamed Justin.
    • Silas is renamed Osprey.
  • The American English dub utilizes most of the character names in the British dub, but some characters are given different names as well.
    • Rita/Fiona is renamed Lucy.
    • Gunnar/Justin is renamed, of all things, Dick Balsac.
    • Silas/Osprey is renamed Marcus.
    • Joanna is renamed to Joanne, though Barry refers to her as Joanna in one scene.
  • Downplayed with Terkel himself in the Swedish dub; his name is changed to Torkel.
• Eye Scream: Rita is eventually blinded... by forks.
• Finger-Twitching Revival: Gunnar
• Gag Dub: The American dub has several elements of this. Despite sticking somewhat close to the original script, there are several moments of randomly added profanity and sexual jokes that weren't in the Danish version or really any other dub of the film. The trailer for the dub goes even harder on this, with almost every line being some sort of irreverent joke that wasn't in the dub.
• Granola Girl: Gunnar can be considered a male example.
• Hilarious Outtakes
• Horror Hippies: Gunnar is an obvious parody of a common teacher stereotype in Danish fiction. The laid-back, socially conscious teacher, who was very much inspired by the counter-culture of the late 1960's. He also a complete psychopath who is the one who is actually stalking, psychologically terrorizing Terkel, and plotting to kill him for the sole reason he accidentally squashed a spider by sitting on it. During his Motive Rant Gunnar also tells a horrified Terkel how he plans to make his murder "environmentally-responisble" by cutting his body to pieces after killing him and then burying the pieces in different parts of the woods, so Terkel can turn into compost and thereby "repay" his "debt to nature".
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Jason. Despite how much of a jerk he's shown to be to Joanna and in some moments Terkel, he's one of the few characters in the film who shows any sort of concern for Terkel's well being. His reason for getting mad at him later on is also fairly understandable, due to how quickly Terkel was to trust Sten and Saki after how much they bullied him the past few days.
• Limited Wardrobe: Every character has always the same outfit, except for Arne, who appears as several characters during the whole film. Terkel's father also reads the same newspaper every day!
• Lost Aesop: At the end, Arne tries to come up with a lesson, but fails (spouting a lot of mixed-up proverbs that really doesn't apply to the film) before he gives up, opens up a beer, and walks off the screen as he promises the audience that he will call them once he comes up with a good answer.
• The Napoleon: The two thing that most notable about Sten is that he is the shortest kid in Terkel's class... And he is a massive bullying jerkass.
• Not Now, Kiddo: While fleeing through the woods from the insane and murderous Gunnar, Terkel happens upon a road, and who happens to drive down the road but his uncle Stewart on his scooter? Terkel panicky begs for a lift out of the forest. Stewart, however, explains that he is on a run to pick up booze and refuses to ditch his booze crate on the back of the scooter, and is therefore unable to give Terkel a lift. Terkel then asks if the two of them just could walk, but Stewart rejects this too, telling Terkel that the shop will just close before he can reach it. Terkel tries to explain that the situation is serious and his teacher is attempting to murder him right as they speak, but Stewart, clearly interpreting the statement as hyperbole, casually waves it off by telling Terkel that it shows the importance of paying more attention to your homework and drives off.
• Only Sane Man / Only Sane by Comparison: Terkel is the Straight Man and a way more reasonable than the other characters. He is a bit absent minded, lazy and annoyed by his younger sister. In other words, a normal 12 year old boy. He has one massive What the Hell, Hero? moment, which is even lampshaded by Arne, which certainly sticks out. But unlike most of the cast he is actually horrified by Doris's suicide likely because it was his fault.
• Red Herring: In many clues hint that Jason is the one out to get Terkel because he had a large part in his sister's being Driven to Suicide. Actually Jason didn't blame Terkel for the suicide, and it's Gunnar who's out to get him, for a much, much more petty reason.
• Screen-to-Stage Adaptation: Was adapted into a stage musical with more songs. The idea itself was inspired by a a class of danish sixth-graders at Jyllingeskole that were given permission to put up the film in their school as a play.
• Shout-Out:
  • To The Shining and The Godfather, among others.
  • The creepy opening credits are inspired by Se7en's opening credits.
• Split-Screen Phone Call: When Terkel phones to uncle Stewart. Near the end, Terkel also phones to his parents, who were apparently involved in some kind of sex act (father dressed as a baby and mother as a dominatrix).
• The Unintelligible: Leon, Terkel's father, is able to communicate just by saying "No" over and over with various tones. Parodied during the Hilarious Outtakes, when Leon can't remember what he's supposed to say.

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