WeAnimate 2025-08-21 | wam#0065

Thorbjørn Christoffersen has directed some of the most popular Danish animated films in recent memory, including Terkel in Trouble, Ronal the Barbarian, and the hugely successful Checkered Ninja series. He is also a well-known illustrator of children’s books, notably the Anton & Grandma and Sally’s Dad book series. His prolific output, along with the immense popularity of his projects, have connected a whole generation of young people with his unique style and humor.

We recently spoke with Thorbjørn just ahead of the release of Checkered Ninja 3. It is difficult to capture in writing his incredible enthusiasm and humor, his fast speaking, big gestures, and theatrical expressions. In this interview, he candidly shares his approach, his inspiration, and his amazing attitude toward animation and filmmaking.

WA: Tell us a bit about your background.

TC: I grew up on a farm. That’s the first thing I need to say. I come from a little village in Funen. My dad was a farmer, my mom was a schoolteacher, and I have an older sister and two younger brothers. At the time, there wasn’t really any schooling in arts, and there weren’t any artists in my family. My mom actually has some artful skill; before she had kids she was sculpting and drawing, and you can see that she knows what she’s doing, but I don’t remember her using that skill when I was a kid.

I didn’t go to kindergarten, and I was kind of on my own a lot, drawing. My mom was very appreciative of my drawing, and praised it a lot. And, you know, when a kid gets special attention for some kind of skill, they start to realize that when they do that thing, they get love. For me, drawing became a way of getting someone to tell me I did a good job, and that’s still kind of something that drives me to this day.

That attention is probably why I also love animation, and what got me into directing as well. I like showing off. [laughs] But seriously, if I was just drawing for myself, without having any feedback–just drawing in a book and then closing it up and moving on–that doesn’t make any sense to me. The work is so hard, why would I do it if there wasn’t any appreciation afterward?

 

– Thorbjørn Christoffersen 

I was very drawn to telling stories, and had a very vivid imagination. I started doing Dungeons & Dragons when I was 12 or so, and quickly became the game-master, because I loved tinkering with the story parts and having all my players do what I wanted. We had some great weekends where we stayed up late at night and everyone just got shit-scared because of the story. Whenever something like that happens, whenever the story builds up into a bigger moment, and you get into a mood where you start to really feel the thing–that’s so incredible. A part of that is also what attracts me to filmmaking, and why we spend so much time telling these stories–that’s the reaction we want. For me, that’s the goal. That’s what I want to achieve.

WA: How did you start your career in animation?

TC: I went to The Animation Workshop. My wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, wanted to go to Copenhagen after high school because she wanted to study literature at the university, and I just moved with her because I had no idea what I wanted to do. I thought that I wanted to do something about drawing, but there weren’t really any options. So I went to the office where people help you find a job. Those places always have a lot of information about education, because there are a lot of young people there. I saw this flier for The Animation Workshop and I just seized on it – “This is what I need to do!” I still have that brochure. It’s one of my most prized possessions. At that time, it wasn’t funded by the state, and we had to pay for it ourselves. Luckily my parents had set aside a college fund for me, which is kind of nice. You would expect that a mom and dad on a farm wouldn’t have cared for animation, but they’ve never been anything but super supportive of my choices. I think perhaps they just recognized that that was what I needed to do. My dad completely wrote me off from taking over the farm [laughs].

So I went to The Animation Workshop, and that was the first time I met anyone who thought the same way I did. For the first time, at about 21 years old, I was suddenly with people who had the same feelings and the same dreams as I did. I met Kresten [Vestbjerg Andersen], who has been my friend for longer than anyone but my wife. For me, he is family now. It was very special meeting all my friends for the first time. I think that’s one of the best years of my life, and I have had many good years.

I won’t lie, I know I’m a talented guy and can do a lot of things. But the luck of meeting certain people along the road who enabled me, or we enabled each other, to create something and to succeed in that together, is just so important.

You can’t underestimate the way that other people help you create what you need to create, and become who you’re going to become. Talent alone won’t help you. It won’t do it. It takes a village to make an animated movie. If you want to do it on your own, you’ll only be able to make one movie in your lifetime.

 

– Thorbjørn Christoffersen 

At The Animation Workshop, many of the teachers were professionals from the industry, so apart from just sharing their skills and know-how, you can also build some connections, and that’s what happened to me. Someone from A. Film saw that I had a knack for storyboarding, and asked if I was interested in an internship on a feature film after I graduated. It was pre-production for a film that ultimately didn’t get made, and it was unpaid, which was common at that time, but it gave me a foot in the door. While I was there, another project got greenlit: an animated Hans Christian Andersen TV series, and they needed an assistant storyboarder. Not even a real storyboarder, but someone to just cut out the panels and move things around. So that’s how I started my career, and to this day I think of myself as a storyboarder. It’s the thing I do: I storyboard all the movies, a lot of them on my own. We can get into that later because I have a whole nice thing all worked out about how to do pre-production, and I will share it with you.

WA: You’ve basically been working with those same people from TAW ever since.

TC: Yes. Our team started out together on Terkel in Trouble, when we only had like 8 animators, and I myself animated about 12 minutes of that movie, along with directing and storyboarding it. It’s always been a tradition when we work on these Danish low-budget movies that everyone has a lot on their shoulders, and we need people who are willing to take on that responsibility. So the animators don’t get one scene here and there: they get an entire sequence that they are in charge of. I’ve probably made a blocking so they don’t have to set up the camera and stuff, but they have to make sure that everything hooks up and everything is in line, and the acting of each character brings the story forward. So in a way I put every animator in charge, as their own little director in that sequence. And the less I need to tell them, the better I think it is. I mean, that’s not always the case, because some are more in tune than others, and sometimes we think differently, but mostly it works.

It’s so fucking hard to make a movie. It really is. It’s so fucking hard and so much can go wrong, and it always goes wrong in the communication and the expectations between people. Not in the talent or the skill, but always in the communication and the expectation. Whatever you can do to calm it down and make sure you know what’s going on… and if that means working with someone you trust, I wouldn’t blame anyone for working with the same people over and over.

 

– Thorbjørn Christoffersen 

That’s exactly why I like to work with the same people over and over. It’s a hive mind, in a way, and I just feel comfortable knowing that everyone else is comfortable and knows what I’m doing. Usually the major part of the team is old-timers, but I always include a few new faces each time. They won’t be new faces the next time we do it, and there’s a natural progression–some fall out of the industry or move on to other jobs and other movies, but the main core is a lot of the same people.

It’s important to give people tasks where they can shine. I may not know someone and I may give them the wrong task, and then I’m not able to use the very best aspects of their particular skillset. And there’s only room for that if there are only a few new people. Otherwise I would spend the first half of the budget just figuring out “who ARE these people?” and then the first half of the movie would be shit. At least, that’s my fear.

That’s also the way we do it with technology. We choose much of the same technology, and only a few new ones. That’s a low-budget way of thinking: you need to be sure that you can do this new project based on what you’ve done before. Then you put on just a little extra.

In Checkered Ninja 3, there’s going to be fire everywhere. And fire is a whole technology in itself, to have one guy sitting there for an entire movie just making fire. And that’s really cool, but we can’t also do that with clothes and waves and water and hair and all that… Just a few new technologies, and add on a few things each time. But we’ve done it so many times now that it adds up, which is also why it’s great to use the same tools and the same people. We need to be able to do what we’ve done before, otherwise we have to start all over.

WA: Your focus on storyboarding is perhaps the connection between your work as a filmmaker and your work as an illustrator. How do those things go together?

TC: Well, I think back to comic books, and spending all that time figuring out how to tell stories via panels. So of course it’s a skill that I use when doing the books, which is another part of my identity.

When I work with books, I’m best known for my work with my friend Thomas Brunstrøm, who is the writer of Sally’s Dad. We were talking about the coincidences of meeting people. Thomas Brunstrøm is a journalist, and he was my neighbor, and we have kids the same age. Our wives started talking and we realized that our baby monitors could pick up each others’ signals through the walls. Because of that, we could hang out at each other’s homes and still hear our own babies in their beds. It was so great because we could have movie nights or game nights and hang out and eat and drink wine. And Thomas and I talked a lot about how boring kids books are; kids don’t like them and parents don’t like them, getting drunk and just complaining and saying “yeah, we should do a book!” We did that for a couple of years and I didn’t really think much about it, until one day he said that he had a story and sold it to his publisher, and it was already a done deal. So we did that one and it just took off. The librarians really helped us out and called attention to it, and kept buying it for the libraries all over the country, and that’s what started it.

And I could have lived anywhere else. And he could have met anyone else… There’s so much coincidence that it’s scary to think about. Again, talent, yes, but meeting the right people makes all the difference. For me, there are a few people in my life like that: Anders Matthesen, obviously, but also Trine Heidegaard, the producer who I have worked with on every movie. You could say it about the entire team, really; that without them it wouldn’t have happened.

WA: Most of your work is aimed at younger audiences. What about that appeals to you?

TC: Whenever I start out on something, especially a film, I start by asking myself “What do I want to see?” It’s like I still have contact with my inner old 12-year-old self, and I still can ask myself what would blow his mind. How scary should it be, what should the humor be, how far can it go? I have a really soft spot for tacky pop culture. I loved Robert Crump and all that. I find it beautiful, especially the kind of stuff that doesn’t get made any more because it’s just so outrageous. There was a time there in the 70s and 80s, especially in comic book and pop culture, when everything just went crazy and you could do almost anything.

I like things that are a little bit scary as well. I am very fond of my nightmares, of the movies that scared me the most as a kid. I am very fond of those movies today, because it’s a feeling that’s mine. As a kid, I could get those feelings every week from something on television. I rarely went to the cinema because we lived in the countryside, so I think I saw my first movie in a cinema when I was about 7 or 8, which was a huge experience. I remember seeing Willow, and it’s burned into my brain; it was a great experience, it was so terrifying. And I also saw Ronia the Robber’s Daughter, the Astrid Lindgren story, where Ronia and her friend Birk run off to live in the troll woods… When I saw it I was about that same age, and we had a forest at my home, a big piece of land where I spent many hours playing and imagining, and it just captivated me.

I like it when I have a strong reaction to something, and as I get older it gets harder and harder to have a genuine reaction. When you saw something as a child or as a young adult, everything was so much clearer and the feelings were unveiled, so you felt them naturally more intensely. That feeling gets harder to capture as we are exposed to more and more stuff over time. We get used to it, and we need a bigger dose of it, so it’s exciting when I see something that makes me feel something.

 

– Thorbjørn Christoffersen 

WA: Between the movies and the books, a lot of kids are growing up with your work. How does it feel to influence a whole generation?

TC: [laughs nervously] Well, these are family experiences, something that kids experience with their parents, because everyone can agree on watching Checkered Ninja or Ronal the Barbarian together. The kid brother, the older brother, the teenager, mom and dad, they can all agree on those films and have a shared experience as a family. Same thing with the Sally’s Dad books; the parents and the kids enjoy them together. The books are read to the kids, and then they grow up and start reading them to themselves; we hear that many kids learn to read on the Sally’s Dad books.

If that’s influencing a generation, I think that’s fine. But I think I should let others decide whether the movies are a good influence. If kids love something and they think it’s really really funny, you can be sure there’s an adult somewhere saying that it’s dangerous.

 

– Thorbjørn Christoffersen 

WA: So much of your work is in franchise after franchise and series after series. How do those projects stay fresh for you?

TC: I take in a large amount of pop culture… I just see everything I can. That’s my hobby! Drawing used to be my hobby, and now it’s my work, so in my free time I want to read a book, I want to read a comic, I want to see a film, I want to fill up my archives, I want to research! I’m on a quest for knowledge all the time, I love learning something all the time. I think it’s important to stay curious, and stay true to the question I mentioned earlier of “what would I want to see?”

I’ve been asked about franchises many times: “How do you create an IP?” or “How do you create a franchise?” and the answer is that you don’t. You don’t do it. That’s not why you’re doing it. Instead, you are creating something that stays true to your vision, or that you would really really like to see. And I imagine that, if I would really like to see something, then there are a lot of other people who probably want to see it too.

 

– Thorbjørn Christoffersen 

When people think about Checkered Ninja as a new franchise that started from the first movie, they are wrong. Checkered Ninja is part of a much bigger universe that Anders Matthesen created 20 years before the first movie, and has stayed true to the entire time. Many of the characters are characters that he used in sketches and stand-up comedy for many years. So that IP is much much older than the movies: you just don’t know it when you’re creating it.

When you see the third one you’ll realize that they aren’t really a series: it’s almost like they are three different genres, in a way. The first one was a kind of coming-of-age magical realism type of story. The second one was more like a gung-ho retro-70’s kids adventure story. And the third one is going to be so fucking scary [laughs]. It’s like a psychic thriller for children. So it’s three different movies, because we don’t want to do what we did before.

There are characters that are very easy to work with. When they are grounded, and have a well-thought-out characterization, you can then take the character and put them in any situation you can think of, and that becomes a new piece because the character is so solid. That’s also how we think about Sally’s Dad. When we think about what we should do next, we think of everything that you and I might do that would be kind of boring, like getting groceries or something. But because Sally’s dad is such a character, that boring thing instantly becomes a scene. It’s the same thing with the Checkered Ninja and those characters: they are SO distinct that you can put them in any situation, even if it’s a boring one, and they would make it CRAZY. That’s part of the fun and makes the franchise.

I mentioned earlier the feelings you can have as a member of an audience, and that feeling is very important to me. When I make a movie I steal 80 minutes of someone’s time, and I need to make sure that those 80 minutes were worth it. I get so angry when I waste time on something.

 

– Thorbjørn Christoffersen 

Like everyone else, my mind was blown watching Adolescence on Netflix; just a mindblowing story, but also the technicality of blocking out those shots… I’m a huge Spielberg fan, obviously, and I think it’s just so rare now that directors are real moviemakers and doing good blocking. People were schooled on that from television in the 60s and 70s, because you couldn’t cut away every second and you needed to capture everything in long takes and make sure that everyone was on their cue. You can see it in something like The Fabelmans; every scene is just so beautifully blocked, and I could get the chills right now talking about it. For me it’s just perfect, it’s a symphony, I enjoy it so much. I could turn off the sound and just enjoy the blocking by itself. If I could have just a tiny bit of that talent in my storyboards, I would be so happy. I love doing storyboards but I think I cut too much.

WA: Do you cut so much because maybe that’s where the action is or that’s where the comedy is?

TC: I do it because we have a low budget and we can’t have everyone walking around through every scene [laughs]. We need to keep it fast paced. We were just watching the new Checkered Ninja yesterday for the first time. It’s one week away from the final mix, so it’s very close to finished, and for me it was just sitting down and watching the whole thing from the beginning.  There’s the little timecode display in the corner, and I was just like “Wow! Wow! A lot of things just happened! I love it! Wow, so much! And we’re only halfway through and WOW!” That’s the pacing of the film.

WA: You mentioned that you have a system for pre-production.

TC: Yes! It’s only on these three Checkered Ninja movies that I’ve fully realized the power of The Bad Animatic. Typically you work on the animatic for a very long time. You have the script and you’re trying to do something great, and you put it all together and it’s the first time that you see everything in its entirety, and it’s 20 minutes too long and the story fucking sucks. It’s the same thing every time. It happens every single time. And you think “Oh, my god, it’s all a failure, it doesn’t work, how could I be this blind?” and you just go home depressed. And you think about it for a few weeks, feeling bad, and then you slowly start to realize how to fix it and you start over again. So now that I’ve realized that this Bad Animatic is just part of the process, I’m focused on how to get to it more quickly. We need to get past that point, and we have to do it faster.

So what I’ve done on these 3 movies is to storyboard with a big team, 5 storyboarders in total, working as fast as possible. We look at the script and do exactly what’s in there, instead of trying to fix things as we go. It takes about three months or so, and then we’ve got the crappiest animatic put together. Not because the storyboarders aren’t good! They are great, don’t get me wrong; it’s just that the story isn’t working. But it NEVER is.

The thing is that an overview of a bad movie is better than an overview of no movie at all. The vital part of making something work is to clear out all the errors, and the sooner you get an overview of where those faults are, the more time you have to fix it. That’s the rule. That’s what I’ve learned, and everyone should know. Stop fearing the bad result, just get to it very very quickly, because the quicker you get to it the more time you have to fix it.

 

– Thorbjørn Christoffersen 

So then I have 3-6 months with just me and one other storyboarder, and we re-work all the storyboards from beginning to end. I mean, yeah, you’re basically making the whole animatic twice, but you’ve made the first one without thinking about fixing things until you’ve gotten all the way through and identified all the weak parts. So now instead of feeling like a failure after the Bad Animatic, which really affected me for a long time, now I know that it’s just part of the process and we have to embrace the errors.

And that directly affects the quality of the movie, because so many things depend on how well you use pre-production time. If you have a shot that’s not very well animated, because you have a low budget or whatever, to me that’s not as big a deal if you’ve spent the time and money on the story. I believe that’s part of the success of these films.

WA: Do you have any more advice for aspiring animation directors?

TC: When really young kids ask me this, I always say “Don’t stop drawing.” All these 8 and 9 year old kids are drawing right now, but at some point it won’t be cool and they will want to do something else. And that’s the first failure: if you stop drawing as a young person, it’s very hard to pick it up again later. So if you are serious about it, don’t stop drawing. Keep on doing it and keep on enjoying it. Skill and talent are not the same. If you want skill you have to spend hours doing it. Like a carpenter, like a musician: practice your skills. Then when you get older you can go to The Animation Workshop and they’ll take care of the rest.

For animation students, I would say be open to possibilities from the very beginning. Diversify your skills and have a lot of different projects going on at the same time. Know that you can’t do it on your own: it takes a lot of people to make your vision come true. And it’s fucking work. You need to be prepared to sacrifice your evenings and weekends and holidays sometimes. Work your ass off.That’s something that I learned at the farm. I really learned how to work and work hard, so I can work for many many hours.

WA: What are you working on next? 

TC: More books, definitely a lot more books, but I’m just waiting a bit before I start talking about them. In some form or plan I need to push for an animation of Sally’s Dad; I think that’s a no-brainer. But I’m not sure what form and I’m not sure that I’m the one who should be in charge of it. Of course I want to be involved because it’s my brain-child too, but I don’t have any experience making movies for children that young, and I’m not sure I can use the same set of skills. So I know my limits and it may not be right for me. I just want to make things scary, and I’m not sure that’s right for younger kids. [laughs]

When Checkered Ninja 3 premieres in August, I will have been working on Checkered Ninja for about 10 years. It’s been 10 wonderful years, but it might be time to pursue some new ideas. From the very beginning we agreed on only 3 movies, and I can feel now that that was a good decision. If we were to make a 4th or a 5th, I feel that we would start to rely on the same old things. It’s time for new ideas.

Catch Checkered Ninja 3 in theaters this August, and keep an eye out for Thorbjørn’s next successful franchise, whatever it may be.

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