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Director: Piet Kroon
Release date: October 13, 2018
Rating: ★★
Review:

The Dutch animated feature film industry long consisted of one movie only, ‘Als je begrijpt wat ik bedoel’ (The Dragon That Wasn’t (Or Was He?)) from 1983. But in recent years several other films saw the light, mostly directed at youngsters: ‘Nijntje de film’ (Miffy the Movie) from 2013 , ‘Pim & Pom: Het Grote Avontuur’ and ‘Trippel Trappel – Dierensinterklaas’, which are both from 2014, and more recently ‘Knor’ (‘Oink’) from 2022 and ‘Vos en haas redden het bos’ from 2024. An oddball within this recent canon is ‘Heinz’ from 2018.

‘Heinz’ was a comic strip by René Windig and Eddie de Jong that run in Dutch newspapers from 1987 to 2000 and again from 2004 to 2006. The comic strip was about a cat, Heinz, who quickly got more anthropomorphized until he became a sort of everyman. The strip knew some continuities but remained first and foremost a gag strip. Nevertheless, the authors dreamt of an animation film at least since the early 2000s.

Although film studio Zig Zag film started working on a film already in 2002, Windig’s and De Jong’s dream never amounted to anything. That is, until the project got new backing and new support from veteran animator Piet Kroon in 2015.

Piet Kroon had ample experience in America, having directed the animation for ‘Osmosis Jones’ (2001) and having worked on stories for a wide variety of animated feature films, e.g. ‘The Iron Giant’ (1999), ‘The Tale of Despereaux’ (2008),  ‘Rio’ (2011) and ‘Ferdinand’ (2017). Kroon wrote a completely new story for the film, and with this much of the charm of the original comic strip got lost, and I doubt whether Windig and De Jong are pleased with the end result.

The first aspect of the original comic strip that went out of the window was its family-friendly nature, despite being produced by Burny Bos, who produced some of the best Dutch live action children’s movies. The feature film is clearly directed to adults and has little to offer for younger audiences (in the Netherlands the film is advised for 12 years and older, that says enough). The second major change Kroon made was the setting. The original comic strip takes place in an undefined fantasy Netherlands, but the movie Heinz clearly lives in the center of Amsterdam, which incidentally is also the residence of the comic strip’s two authors.

A more profound and more disturbing change than these two is the change of character of the cat himself. In the comic strip Heinz certainly is cranky, and sometimes insufferable, but in the movie, he is a downright irresponsible drunkard and deadbeat. In fact, in the early scenes the cat is so unsympathetic one wonders why he must watch the cat’s immature antics in the first place. Heinz’s voice by Ruben van der Meer, on the other hand, is well-chosen.

Heinz’s girlfriend Dolly fares little better, as she has changed from a sweet love to a working-class shrew, while Heinz’s friend Frits is nastier and more unsympathetic than his comic book counterpart. Frits also suffers from a bad voice choice (Reinder van der Naalt). In fact, one must look hard for any sympathetic character in the film…

Kroon certainly has tried to put as many characters from the original comic strip as possible into the film, and thus the movie is simply crowded with characters, who mostly make little to no sense to anyone not familiar with the source material. These characters and the rather random inclusion of some gags from the original comic strip make the film too much of an inside joke. On the other hand, the story itself is entertaining enough: it involves time travel, takes Heinz to a remote volcano island and to New York, where he must battle an evil scientist from outer space. But the unsympathetic leads, the plethora of characters, and the random, and often repeated gags make the film a tiresome watch.

The film’s stylistic choices don’t help. The background art is pretty ugly and consists of reworked photo material against which the characters don’t read very well. The ocean is even live action footage. Again, with this method much of the original charm of the comic strip gets lost. The computer animation is a mixed bag. There are a lot of animation cycles, and especially the numerous background characters walk around like automatons with little to no life in them.

No doubt, these technical drawbacks result from an all too tight budget, as it’s a marvel that the film came about in the first place. Most charming are the depictions of Heinz’s fantasies, which consist of traditional animation of René Windig’s idiosyncratic drawings. It’s too bad only these little sequences were made this way.

In all, ‘Heinz’ is a disappointing movie that will attract small audiences, neither satisfying fans of the original comic strip nor anyone else. I cannot find any figures, but I am pretty sure the movie turned out to be a box office flop, and I regret to say unsurprisingly so.

Watch the Dutch trailer for ‘Heinz’ yourself and tell me what you think: