Jan Rahbek: The Magic of Krølle Bølle

WeAnimate 2026-02-03 | wam#0072

Krølle Bølle is a little troll who emerged from the pages of a children’s book to become the beloved mascot and symbol of Bornholm. This month, 80 years after Bornholm native Ludvig Mahler published the first Krølle Bølle book, the character premieres on the big screen, in a lovely family-friendly Danish animated film. 

WeAnimate spoke with director Jan Rahbek about the challenges of bringing Krølle Bølle to life in a hybrid film that mingles animation with live action. In this fascinating interview, he shares his process, his inspiration, and some of what makes this movie magical.

WA: Most filmmakers tend to work either in live action or in animation, but you seem pretty comfortable in both genres. How did that happen?

JR: Well, I grew up in a fairly small town called Vamdrup in Jutland, and in that town there was a small movie theater. It was driven by volunteers, where everyone worked together for free to run the theater. My parents were in the group that started the theater, so I hung out there from a very young age, and later worked there a bit as a projectionist. In that group was also a guy named Bo Hovgaard, who had a small film studio just outside the city. It was actually the first motion control studio in Denmark, back in the late 80s or early 90s, called Bastrup Trickfilm. He and I became really good friends, so my two hang out places were in the theater and at this studio. I thought it was so fantastic, and as a film fan it was a great place to grow up.

Bo was kind enough to let me use some of the equipment, so I started making short films at the studio. I also made short animated films on the computer at home. They were really primitive, using a software called Kid Pix 2; it had a feature where you could create slideshows, but I actually used it to create animation.

At that point, I was equally interested in both film and in animation. I was honestly interested in movie-making in general. I have a pretty wide taste, including documentary and other genres, because I just love the medium.

Ultimately, I just had so much fun making those early short films, it made me want to keep going. In my early 20s I went to the European Film College and did some animation there. I then stumbled upon the fantastic Københavns Tekniske Skole. It was a place where you could go and have all these different creative classes, like watercolor painting, photography, or After Effects. For me, it was like a hidden paradise. I did some short films there, and then I applied to the film school for the animation department, and went to the National Film School of Denmark.

One of the things I love about animation is that you can do just about anything you can imagine, and live action is a bit more locked-down; you need to be in a real location and so on. So if you want to do something more fantastic, animation is the obvious choice for that.

There’s also something with animation where it’s easier to portray emotions. There’s a more direct connection for the emotions to the audience.

WA: Your graduation film was animated, and it was very well received,  winning the Odense Talent Award. Can you talk a little more about what film school was like for you?

JR: Being at the film school was such a great place. It felt like you were in a little bubble, in a good way. In school, you have the freedom to do exactly the film you want to do, without thinking at all about things like the target audience. So my graduation film looks like a kid’s film, but it’s also pretty violent, but I didn’t have to think about that kind of thing at all.

After film school I realized that the reality is that films have to have an audience, and of course you have to think about the business. People are not necessarily interested in you and your vision; they are interested in what they themselves can get out of a project. Which makes sense, of course, but it’s something to consider. You often have to fight for your vision and do a lot of convincing. That is probably my least favorite aspect of making a film, and at film school I was spared most of that.

WA: What were the origins of the Krølle Bølle film?

JR: Our producer, Nina Lyng, grew up on Bornholm. She had the idea of making a film about Krølle Bølle, and approached me with the concept. To be honest, at the beginning I thought that Krølle Bølle was an ice cream, and I didn’t know the story. But then I learned about the character and read the books, and got really interested in the project.

One of the things I liked about adapting Mahler’s books is that the story is fairly basic, so there was a lot of room to add things and create our own take on it. Our movie characters and setting are based on those in the books, but our story is very different.

I also really liked the character of Krølle Bølle himself. He’s kind of a troublemaker, although I like the Danish word ballademager better; it sounds nicer. But he is always getting into trouble, and he’s a bit of a black sheep. Always doing everything wrong, according to his family, but he’s actually really sweet and naive, and has a lot of energy. I really like this character, and it’s a good basis for a story.

WA: Could you tell us a bit about the design process?

JR: Of course we have the original illustrations from the books, which are charming and work well in 2D, but we wanted to translate it into 3D. If we were to take it literally,  , which wasn’t really what we were going for. We wanted him to look younger, to be childlike, and to work better in 3D. Our character designer, Julie Hauge Pisanu, did a great job, and I was really pleasantly surprised how well the 2D drawings were translated into 3D designs.

For the environment, we needed to be able to move our story from CG into the real world, so our backgrounds needed to be designed and stylized, but also needed to have realistic textures and look like something that could exist in the real world. The whole look and feel of the CG environment turned out so much better than I expected. It has a lot of mood and atmosphere.

A big source of inspiration for me was Minuscule, where the animated characters are pretty rough and primitive, but they get so much mileage out of those backgrounds. There is a lot of production value in the way they handle the live action plates, and that was very inspiring.

I also really wanted the troll characters to be small. A bit inspired by Minuscule again, but I think it helps to have small characters in a live action plate; I think it’s more convincing. It’s also fun to take the camera down and see things from their perspective. It makes everything a bit more fantastic.

WA: Could you explain your approach to hybrid filmmaking?

JR: Although this is technically a hybrid film, it’s an animated film first and foremost because the main characters are animated, and we see things from their perspective. So to me it’s mostly an animated film. Of course, the process of making animation is very different from making live action, but it was really fun to do. In a way it reminded me of all the short films I used to make when I was younger.

To me, the biggest difference between live action and animation production is that in animation you can focus on one thing at a time. You can focus on the camera and get it how you want, and then move on to animation, and then lighting… Because everything is separate you can really focus on each thing. Whereas when you are doing live action it’s everything at the same time: you have to get the acting and lighting and camera and sound and everything all good at once.

You also can’t really fix mistakes in the same way you can with animation, where there is a long period of time where it’s possible to go back and make changes.

We divided the shots into three categories: fully live action with actors, fully cg in the animated world, and the hybrid shots with both live action and animation. The challenge for us was that there were so many shots: most films with visual effects only have a few shots here and there, but we had so many.

We had a fairly big live action team because we needed so much set up for light and sound and everything. For the live action hybrid shots without actors, we had a fairly small team to shoot the background plates. We had little printed out models the size of the characters, and we would place them in the scene and play it out, almost like playing with dolls, framed and focusing on them, and we filmed that as reference. Then we would take out the characters and shoot the background plate again, and then shoot it a third time with a classic VFX setup with the chrome ball and everything.

When you are doing a fully cg film, it’s a more straightforward pipeline and you can make it run really smoothly. But here, where so many shots were hybrid, there were also a lot of shots that had something different or specific about them, so they had to be handled in unique ways. So it was also a challenge to handle so many of these special shots.

WA: How was it collaborating with Hydralab?

JR: It was really great working with Hydralab. I had them in mind from the very beginning, thinking that they would be a great fit for this kind of project. It was fantastic working with Tonni and Sunit. They are so talented, and contributed tremendously to the project, and it would be great to work with them again at some point.

When you are working on a film, you have an idea of what you want it to be, but it always turns out a little bit different from what you expected. It has its own life in a way, which also makes it exciting. It feels like it almost wants to be itself, that it wants to come out into the world. And of course with so many people contributing, everyone brings their own little something to it.

WA: What was your favorite part of making this movie?

JR: The most interesting aspect to me is seeing the characters come to life. We are talking a lot about technical aspects, but it’s important to remember that all of that is really there to serve the story.

Telling the story and making the characters come to life is most important to me. I love when I am watching a scene and I forget everything about how it was made, and just look at the characters and follow the story and get interested in what’s happening. And I really felt that way many times during this film, that these characters really came to life and really felt like real living characters with real personalities. It feels like they really exist in the real world, and when that happens, that’s the magic.

I hope that kids who see the film can relate to Krølle Bølle and his sister. I think they will, because like I said he’s a bit of a troublemaker, and his parents don’t understand him, and I think a lot of kids can relate to that feeling of being misunderstood. I can actually relate to him myself, but then I feel like I can also relate to his parents. I have three boys, and they can also be very Krølle Bølle-like and make trouble. And I’m sure that, as the grownup, I can sometimes misunderstand their world and their interactions; I’m sure they have stuff going on that I don’t understand all the details of. So perhaps parents will find themselves also relating to both sides of the story.

But I also really hope that people can just enjoy the adventure of the story. It’s an opportunity to open the door to a secret magical world, to see into the hidden underground universe of the trolls, and I hope people enjoy it.

Credits