WeAnimate 2026-01-20 | wam#0069

Danish audiences are eagerly awaiting the animated adaptation of Jakob Martin Strid’s beloved When Mumbo Jumbo Grew Giant. This beautiful film has been carefully crafted by A. Film’s Oscar-nominated Karsten Kiilerich, who wrote the screen adaptation and co-directed the film with Stine Buhl. Join us for a behind-the-scenes peek at the process of bringing this famous book to life.

A. Film has been producing animation in Denmark since 1988, and is responsible for many of the country’s most successful films and shows. Simply maintaining an animation studio for 37 years is a huge accomplishment, but A. Film has also managed to create a company culture where passion for animation and respect for animators remains a driving force, even after all this time. As we get to know the artists and creators behind this film, these themes continue to emerge, showcasing how deeply the team at A. Film love their work, love animation, and loved creating this film.

Karsten Kiilerich is one of the veterans of Danish animation, with a career that began in the 80s. As a co-founder of A. Film, he has written and/or directed numerous animated films and television shows, and been nominated for many prestigious awards, including a Robert Award and festival nominations for Help! I’m a Fish and The Ugly Duckling and Me. He is also an Academy Award nominee for co-directing the short film Når livet går sin vej. We recently spoke with Karsten about Mumbo Jumbo and his career in animation.

WA: To begin with, can you tell us a bit about your background?

Karsten: I actually started my filmmaking career as a schoolteacher. It’s a relatively short education and I’m a lazy person, so that’s what I did. I studied drawing in seminary, and then became a drawing teacher for kids with different kinds of problems, behavioral issues and so on. I worked as a schoolteacher for about 5 years or so, but was always really interested in animation.

Then an American guy, Jeffrey Varab, and two Danish guys, Jakob Stegelmann and Jørgen Klubien, made an academy for animation, so I learned how to animate in my spare time. Then they offered us a chance to participate in making the film Valhalla. In the beginning it was just in-betweens and cleaning up, learning by doing, but over time we got better and we made the movie. Then we worked on something called Troll Story, which is basically still on the shelf after all these years. It never happened, but I haven’t given up. I always say if I make that film, then I can finally rest.

Then we formed A. Film. Five guys together: Stefan Fjeldmark, Jørgen Lerdam, Hans Perk, Anders Mastrup, and myself. We had that company together for many many years, but now I’m basically the only one left.

WA: Did you guys just get along and decide to start a business?

Karsten: Yes.

WA: Did you have a business plan?

Karsten: Excuse me? A what? [laughs] Our plan was to see if we could survive; that was the plan. There wasn’t really much to do when we started, so we made our bread and butter on commercials. Then somehow we made a few contacts, and got some work with Don Bluth on Thumbelina and on Troll in Central Park. It was all 2D in those days, of course, and I worked on those movies flipping paper. They always said, ‘Oh, you must be so patient! You make 5 seconds of film a week!’ I never saw it that way. I thought it was just one drawing after another, and it was fun work. Usually. For Bluth, at least, it was very complicated and demanding work, because the quality was very high.

WA: How did A. Film become so successful?

Karsten: Hard work and a bit of luck. No talent at all. [laughs] We were five guys together, and everyone participated with whatever they could do. I spent a lot of time contacting people and making connections and getting the work. Stefan was designing a lot of stuff, and somehow we managed it. In those days, there weren’t so many people working in the business, so maybe that helped as well. But it was one step at a time.

At a certain point we had some financial troubles, so Nordisk put some cash in, and that really helped. We worked with Nordisk for several years. We also met the right people. Jeffrey, who we knew from Valhalla, came to us with some work for Ferngully, an American movie directed by Bill Kroyer. So we got big chunks of American movies to do; we worked for Warner on The Magic Sword… We worked for everybody. We had a huge staff at a certain point, doing commercials, features, and television work at the same time. But really it’s hard to explain how it all worked out. You have to just be there all the time.

Our first original movie was Jungledyret Hugo. You know, in order to get funded, you have to be a bit sly and clever… The DFI said that since we hadn’t ever produced a movie before, we couldn’t produce one now. But we had to start somewhere, so we teamed up with Per Holst, an experienced producer, and that was our little keyhole into the real world, so to speak, of producing films.

Then Anders Mastrup and I went out into the world, down into Europe, and met all these people who were setting up systems for co-productions. It was called Cartoon, back in the beginning. Then we got some contacts and did some German films and a ton of TV shows. I’ve directed a lot of TV shows.

So then I started writing, and eventually directing. The Ugly Duckling and Me, lots of TV shows, and a couple of short films. I’m always more interested in quantity, not quality. [pauses, laughs] It was a joke! But over the years we did so much, and somehow we always had enough to do. Seldom a dull moment.

WA: Have you come up with a “recipe” for successful productions?

Karsten: Well, I could say yes. I could say no. I could say yes and no. One kind of recipe is to create your own movies, either from a book or come up with it yourself, like we did with Help! I’m a Fish. But that’s complicated, because you never know when it will be financed. So you have to have several boats in the sea at the same time. We always had two or three legs to stand on. The other leg was work for hire, getting work in house which would pay the rent and bring in some money. There’s nothing wrong with work for hire, and it’s good to have it to fall back on.

When you do a movie, you ‘get your money in heaven’, as they say. It takes forever to recover your money after all that initial investment. So we always agreed to do work for hire to make some real money, and then waste it on our own movies, throwing it out the window on the things we personally wanted to do.

 

– Karsten Kiilerich

I love being an animator, and  it’s been really fantastic to be able to live on this work, without having to drive a taxi at night. I’ve actually survived doing animation all these years, with my friends at A. Film.

We´ve always focused on keeping the relationships we’ve built. We have some really great friends who we have been working with for 20 years or more, and this creates a kind of stable platform. We have a great connection with our friends in Tallinn, a studio called A. Film Estonia. They used to work for us, but it’s their own studio now, and they are able to bring projects the other way around. I’m doing a movie with them called Sipsig, “Raggie” in English, which is a project that they brought to us.

So it’s a puzzle. It’s so many things coming together. You really have to have open ears and eyes all the time. And you also have to educate yourself about how to finance things. I’m basically creative, but I always advise people to know about the business, in order to be able to meet the demands of the real world. That’s another key to success.

 

– Karsten Killerich 

And the world keeps turning. When we made Help! I’m a Fish, the budget was DKK 104 million, which was a lot of money in this country. Then the next movie was Terkel in Trouble, which was just 10 million. It was a different production, of course. It was CGI, but obviously we had to accept a lot of limitations. The director could say ‘No’ to one out of twenty scenes, otherwise he had to accept them. It was a different way, but fast, furious, and fun. When we talk to animators from Pixar for example, they sometimes complain about the work pressure: ‘Oh, I have to do 3 seconds of one character a week,’ and I’m like ‘What are you talking about? Everybody here does 16 seconds with all the characters in the scene.’ But what can you say? We have these budgets here in Denmark, around 20 million DKK, and we just have to think in economical terms, starting when you are writing the movie.

I do not envy those guys who work in the massive, enormous animation factories. Here the hierarchy is super flat. I’m the director, but nobody listens to me [laughs]. The ones running the films are the production people, who tell you things are too expensive and you have to cut this and that. But these limitations, the framework around you, is good for creativity, and you just have to find ways to make things great on the budget you have. People say ‘Oh, how terrible, you have to fight so hard for such small funding,’ but it’s fine with me.

 

– Karsten Kiilerich

We have a very good pipeline system, and people who have been working at A. Film for a long time know each other very well. They make so many great decisions. If you were a director coming in to a studio and you didn’t know what to expect, or how to communicate, or who’s making what decision, or who can do what, it must be very difficult. A. Film is great for me. I know the people. I know what they do, and what they bring to the movie, so it’s perfect.

I’ve worked on all kinds of animation: short films, TV shows, features, and maybe I make it sound like it’s a mechanical process, but it’s not. It’s all been motivated by joy and fun and the love of animation.

– Karsten Kiilerich

WA: Do you prefer writing films for you to direct yourself?

Karsten: For me it’s very nice to write something that I know I will direct, because then I write things that I know are possible to do. You have to be an artist, but a practical one. I don’t think many people know that I’ve written 5, 7, 10, feature films; maybe more. It’s not easy to direct, but it’s easier when you’ve written it and already thought about how to do it. When you get to the filming process you already know the material so well, and you know what you can do and how it will look. And I can also organize it a bit while writing: allow so many sets, or so many characters. I know the budget, so I know what’s possible. I think that leads to a better result, and we can get really nice pictures out of this process.

There are so many good things about writing/directing, but there could be bad things. You can get caught in your own little loop, especially if you do all this, and then if you also cut the animatic yourself… too many hats. So you really have to discuss things with other people and listen to them, and you have to be open-minded.

We are just finishing When Mumbo Jumbo Grew Giant, and I’m really proud of it. I think that for our 19 million DKK budget, it’s going to look really terrific. And I’m also proud that we can bring something like this to the young kids. It’s so nice and cinematic for the big screen.

WA: What was it like adapting Mumbo Jumbo for a film?

Karsten: It wasn’t very difficult to adapt. We had already worked on Jakob Strid’s The Giant Pear. I had actually tried to get the rights for that story, but it turned out that Nordisk Film already had the rights. But then they asked us to do the movie anyway, so I was involved in that. I really love Jakob’s books, and everyone in this strange little country does. So when I read in the paper that he had written a new book, I immediately thought how nice it would be to make the book into a film.

It has so many different scenes, so it’s very visual, and it’s a cute and simple story: a guy turns giant, he goes to a witch, she turns him small again, and he goes home. So I liked it for that age group, and writing it wasn’t very difficult. I mainly stuck to his story, and just put in a few additional scenes and made some small changes… well, maybe a bit more than that. 

WA: What was it like adapting the original illustrations into the visual style of the film?

Karsten: Well of course when the author has done all the illustrations himself, it’s like giving your child away. But we really worked hard to try to make his 2D characters into CGI, and I think it looks nice and looks like the book. I like Jakob, and I like his books, and the kids can’t get enough of them. I hope they will also like the movie and come to the cinema.

WA: Were there any unexpected challenges in making this film?

Karsten: It was a challenge to find the path from 2D to 3D in design. And there were practical challenges. We had this big hunk of a hippo. No clothes, no nothing: just a huge round ball, basically. So we were trying to figure out his surface, how to make him a bit more interesting. Two short legs, two short arms… he cannot hold things, he cannot reach for things. We can make him do that, but you have to force it. You also can’t see his mouth, because it’s so far underneath his nose, so you have to find a workaround for that. He’s super cute and works really well in the movie, but all of that was a challenge.

I’m really happy with how all the characters work in this film. Some are easier than others, but they really weren’t designed to be well-suited for animation. You draw something on a piece of paper and of course it works because they aren’t moving. We have this little witch, a little matchbox witch, with little feet and no legs. You have to just say ‘Okay, THIS is how she moves.’

With Mumbo Jumbo I  had a co-director, Stine Buhl. She’ll probably tell you that she did everything by herself and I didn’t do anything [laughs]. Our normal production time is 18 months. In this case, because we had so much development with the author, it stretched out much longer. Going from a book to a movie… it’s a help and it’s an enemy. It imposes limitations. When we did Help! I’m a Fish, it was totally original and we just did it ourselves. But then you have to invent absolutely everything, and you don’t have any help at all. I don’t know what’s better.

WA: What’s next?

Karsten: We are working on a lot of things. We are working on something called Rasmus Klump. Rasmus Klump are these old books; they are very cute and very old, so we need to make something that is modern, with better pacing for today’s kids. I directed the TV show back in the 90s, and hopefully we’ll get a film on the screen. When we did the show back in the old days, I liked the fact that they weren’t too fast. It doesn’t have to be boring, but I like it when the tempo is not over the hill all the time.

Miyakazi’s films, for example, spend time in the scene. It’s not always late-in fast-out, you know, and I like that. You could compare it to K-Pop Demon Hunters, which I really liked, but the tempo is so different. The Jungle Book used to be my favorite movie, and I loved how they just stop the movie and sing a song. It’s just entertaining and you enjoy watching it. And it’s so well animated, of course. It doesn’t mean that I don’t like the new features, that’s not the point at all, but there’s something in those older movies that has a certain charm, with the timing, and the nice musical elements…

I do like the idea that you don’t have to push the plot. You can stay in a scene for a little while. You have to connect all the scenes in the movie, of course, but you can have a little bit of spare time. People always say that there are three elements in a film: story, story, and story. And yes, that’s true, but there’s also character, and good animation, and visuals, and other things that are a part of the whole experience.

 

– Karsten Kiilerich

WA: What else is in store for A. Film?

Karsten: It’s been such joy working in animation all these years. I really enjoy working with people, especially skilled people. I’m not a fan of “A Film By So-and-So”; it’s a film by many people. And I know I am sounding a bit like Jesus here, but a film requires just so many skilled artists in order to be made. The basic thing is that it’s a democratic process; it’s really an orchestra.

It’s also fun that our world changes. Not always for the better, but we started out with a pencil and a piece of paper, and now we’re here.

It has its own motor, the world does. It never stops turning. It’s never the same. You could basically sit behind the same screen or table for a whole life, and things would still change all the time. New people come into the room. New stories. New challenges. There are so many things that are brought to you in this work, which I appreciate.

 

– Karsten Kiilerich

So is A. Film the same place? Yes and no. There are so many things that are new, and you can incorporate the things you love into your work, and new shoots grow. It’s a very dynamic process, and very dynamic work. I’m pretty old, but I’m not fed up. I think I still have a few good years before I fall over.

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