Werner - Beinhart! (1990)

This is THE animated German movie. You speak German??, go and see.

This humor is pretty flat. Full of fecal humor and hilarious bullshit. The animations are funny as s***. I simply love it, as any German probably does :)

But yes.... the realistic scenes in between are pretty lame. Some are funny, but .... well... most of them suck. Sad but true. What makes it even worse. The main character in the realistic parts is the animator of the main character in the animated parts. He is one bad actor. Horrible.

Anyways.... the animations are a total payoff. :) go and see

Fmovies: I´m half Dane and half German so i know the language so because of that I understand the movie and I think its great! the animation is crappy but the humor is good. I agree that the scenes that are not animation is boring so i usualy jump over those scenes!

First off, you absolutely need to watch this movie in German (with some good knowledge in this language to boot), because A LOT of it will be lost in translation otherwise.

It's a specific kind of German humor, one that's definitely not everyone's cup of tea, especially since a couple of scenes involve humongous amount of poop, vomit and other grossities. But underneath it's crude exterior lies a clever exaggeration of real life situations based on the authors, Rötger "Brösel" Feldmann, experience.

Take for example when Werner is at work as a heating, air-conditioning and pluming mechanic/installer. I myself have worked in the same field, not the same job, but I've got to know a lot of people that did the same work as the characters and I recognized a lot of traits and mannerism from the movie. There were a lot of stuff going on that immediately felt familiar to me - of course in a exaggerated and comical way. One of the big ones is Meister Röhrich, Werners boss. This is the character that steals the show. The master apparently knows everything better yet is so clumsy that he always ends up causing literally disasters wherever he works at. This alone would be funny enough, but he speaks in a such strange voice and dialect, says a lot of weird job-specific terms, that it's ingenious. And would you know that he is based on a real person that refused to allow them to use his name?

Then there is the marketplace and football, the technical review of the choppers, the hospital visit and other every-once-in-a-while situations I'm sure everyone has come across and it's always fun to see with what Brösel comes up with to parody them.

As you may already know the movie has parts in it that are not animated and filmed live. These scenes are largely considered to be boring and everyone seems to skip them. To be honest, that's what I did too in the past, but over the time they kinda grew on me. Sure, they are amateurish, the humor consist mostly of burping and catchphrases and they generally pale in comparison to the animated material, but they are fun in a so-bad-its-good way and at least they seem to be self-aware about it.

When it comes down to the animation itself, there is little to complain about. It's not as fluent or sharp as e.g. Disney works and even a bit inconsistent and sketchy in the later parts of the movie, but overall just very well executed, with a good sense for physics and a big part why the slapstick in this movie works so well. There always are small things to discover that you didn't notice the first time. It's creative and full of ideas all the time.

The voice-acting was superbly done. Everyone fits perfectly and it's hard not to notice the fun the staff had while delivering their lines. Andi Feldmann easily deserves an award for his role as the eccentric Meister Röhrich.

Werner: Beinhart is pretty much the movie equivalent of a caricature painting. It's about the small things in real-life but exaggerated in a hilarious and creative manner. It is raw, unconcerned fun and it shows what a real person Rötger Feldmann is. It's just a shame that none of the sequels managed to get even close to it's level.

Werner - Beinhart! fmovies. Since the film is divided in animated and real sequences with a tremendous difference in quality, it is very hard to cast a vote that covers both.

The animated part is hilarious (especially the football-match) and deserves definitely 8/10 if not better. A must see!

The real part is a great opportunity to get a new beer from the refrigerator or to carry the old one to the toilet. It is so boring and unfunny, a 1/10 would be overly gracious.

My recommendation is: get it on DVD or Video and skip anything that is not animation.