Hamburg animated films with their own signature

It all started about 15 years ago when the city of Bremen commissioned us to create short animated clips featuring the Bremen Town Musicians, which the city wanted to use for its bid to become Capital of Culture 2010. We developed an unusual design for the four animals and produced four short, hand-made clay animations of the Bremen Town Musicians. The very rough modelling design of the four animals was very well received. And so we took our first step into the world of feature-length cinema films with the Bremen Town Musicians, this time complete with fur and feathers.

Actually, all four animals are protagonists. But it simply made sense dramaturgically not to give all four equal prominence. That's why we gave the unworldly house cat Marnie more space in the story - she ultimately drives the plot forward. It was particularly important to us to create an exciting choreography of four completely different characters. It appealed to us to show the four Bremen Town Musicians not as smooth heroes, but as four anti-heroes brushed against the grain. They should not be interchangeable clichés, but unmistakable in the best sense of the word. Their differences and their gradual convergence are at the centre of the story and make up a large part of the joke.

A naive yet endearing voice. She has dubbing experience in the lead role of Disney's "Rapunzel - Newly Reconciled". She does it well. We are also particularly happy with the voices of the rooster and dog. They take the film to another level with their acting quality.

"Aristocats" was our very first cinema film. It made a big impression on us back then. Just like "Bernhard and Bianca". But apart from that, we were not explicit fans of animated films. Feature films had much more of an impact on us and inspired us as youngsters to want to make films ourselves.

At some point, every filmmaker started making their first little films as a child or teenager. Most of them get a few friends to act in front of the camera. Unfortunately, our friends weren't talented enough for us. So we decided to build and animate the actors ourselves in order to have full control over them - and to be completely free in the creation of worlds. We then stuck with puppet animation. However, we didn't take our inspiration from other animated films, but from sophisticated artistic feature films by the classic film greats (Antonioni, Truffaut, Bresson, Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Polanski...) As the desire to make films professionally became more serious, we thought very carefully about what the perfect puppet animation film should look like, what is strong in this genre and what is not. The end result of these considerations was the idea for our Oscar film "Balance". But of course we also like mainstream, funny animated films! For example, we are also big fans of Pixar films.

It's hard to say exactly where the inspiration comes from. In any case, we only turn a film idea into a film if it has something really original and original that inspires us. Because only then is the gigantic effort worthwhile. And we definitely have a penchant for quirky, black humour, which was already evident in "Balance" and which can also be found here and there in our two debut films - for example, when in "Luis and the Aliens" the aliens explain how life arose on planet Earth. This is because the planet was once used by aliens as a rubbish dump. At some point, strange life developed from this... Or in "The Legendary Four", when the farmer can't bring himself to decide which of his chickens should end up in the soup pot and therefore leaves the decision to the chickens...

While "Luis and the Aliens" was just a kind of first finger exercise for us, with "The Legendary Four" we tried to bring in a bit more of our own style and humour and create a film with an idiosyncratic signature that has rough edges, that is totally silly and crazy one moment and poetic and profound the next. That appealed to us. Fortunately, in Jan Bonath we had an Executive Producer who was confident enough to give us the freedom to put our own stamp on it, despite all the compromises we had to make due to the low budget. The result is by no means perfect, but the first step has been taken towards making beautiful little animated films that have an idiosyncratic, European style and can appeal to both children and adults.

Everything. At the time, we didn't even realise that you could win an Oscar with a short film. We were all the more surprised by the famous phone call from Hollywood telling us that "Balance" had been nominated for an Oscar in the "best animated short" category. After winning the Oscar, there was a real little hype in the German media landscape, which we wanted to capitalise on by spontaneously abandoning our film studies and founding our own small film studio in Hamburg that same year.

As we are always curious, we wanted to take up the challenge and try something new with CGI. We briefly considered making the two films in stop motion. But we really wanted to give Marnie the cat and her friends fur and feathers. This was one of the reasons why we decided to produce the films in CGI. However, in "The Legendary Four" we deliberately kept the stop-motion design of the four animals so that we could show some of the typical stop-motion charm in the film. This has created a very interesting look that sets it apart from other CGI films. It would probably have been a little more expensive and time-consuming to realise the films using stop-motion technology. But it could very well be that one of our next feature-length cinema films will be made in stop-motion again.

In 1990, the very year we won the Oscar, we cancelled our studies and founded our own film studio here in Hamburg. We have lived in Hamburg ever since, and have no intention of leaving the most beautiful city in the world. With LAUENSTEIN&LAUENSTEIN Filmproduktion we have produced countless short animated films and commercials, and in co-operation with Hamburg companies we have also been able to work out the soundtrack, digital image processing etc.. So they were all purely Hamburg productions.

The production of our first two feature-length cinema films was a completely different story. We didn't realise them as Executive Producers, but "only" as Script Writers and Directors. For the production of these films, we looked for a German production house that already had experience with the production of long animated cinema films. The production of these two films was also centred in Hamburg, but there were various international creatives and co-producers who took on important parts of the production. For "The Legendary Four", for example, the modelling and rendering of the set and characters was done in Belgium, the animation in India, the music in Wiesbaden, etc...

No, the working method is too far removed from the production of an animated film.