The origins of Loriot can be found in print, it was television that made him really famous. The artist achieved cult status there with his sketches, for example.
Director Peter Geyer (“Jesus Christ the Redeemer”) has dusted off some of the most well-known of these little, bulbous-nosed stories, freshened up the pale colors and turned them into a film for the big screen. “Loriot’s big animated film revue” starts on April 20th in more than 180 cinemas.
Bernhard-Viktor Christoph-Carl “Vicco” von Bülow, who died almost twelve years ago, was also successful there. In 1988 Loriot shot the comedy “Ödipussi” as an author, director and leading actor, three years later “Pappa ante portas” also reached an audience of millions. With a view to the 100th birthday of Loriot, who was born on November 12, 1923 in Brandenburg an der Havel, animated films are now set to conquer the cinema.
Loriot’s path to fame
The studied painter and graphic artist worked first as a commercial artist, then also as a caricaturist and cartoonist. His work was found in magazines such as “Quick”, “Stern” or “Weltbild”. Loriot later also worked as a columnist and took on smaller roles as an actor, around 1959 in Bernhard Wicki’s anti-war classic “Die Brücke”.
With television, he became really present as an actor, for example on the famous green sofa with or without TV partner Evelyn Hamann. Excerpts like “Please don’t say anything now!” or “There used to be more tinsel!” belong today to the quotation treasure.
Also drawn and set to music sketches such as the 1978 classic “Herren im Bad” with Messrs. Müller-Lüdenscheidt and Dr. Klöbner and a rubber duck (“I always bathe with this duck!” – “Not with me!”) produced Loriot for the six-part television series “Loriot”. In the Radio Bremen production, the humorist alternated between acting and drawing interludes.
Animated films were modernized
“We only tried to restore and modernize Loriot’s animated films – as we believe, in his spirit – into a harmonious dance for the big screen,” described director Geyer during the premiere of “Loriot’s Große Animated Film Revue” as part of the Berlinale his work on the film. The production was created in cooperation with the Loriot daughters Bettina and Susanne von Bülow.
“Everything that I find funny comes from the broken communication, from talking past each other,” Loriot himself once described the basis of his comedy. With the film, the colors in particular have changed, which now appear stronger than in the TV templates.
31 of the popular cartoons were “carefully” redrawn and partly colored for the first time. The series of sketches is loosened up by Loriot’s drawn music numbers, in which he repeatedly implemented songs by the Comedian Harmonists. The Berlin vocal ensemble became famous in the 1920s.
Memories wake up
The almost 80-minute compilation ensures a reunion with many of Loriot’s characters. You can see “The People’s Drug” and “Postal Codes” as well as “The Talking Dog” or “TV Evening”. The texts of the bulbous-nosed actors have sometimes become part of the language culture over the decades.
There is, for example, the marital dispute about “The Breakfast Egg”: “If an egg boils by feel, then it just happens to cook exactly four and a half minutes”. Also classic are the visit “On the racetrack” (“My God, where are you running?”) or the married couple Hermann and Berta in “Feierabend” (“I just want to sit here”).
And of course “Advent” should not be missing. Loriot’s Christmas description of an extremely bloody crime in the romanticized forest is splatter for mental cinema in the gentlest rhyming form: “In the forester’s house kneels by candlelight / the forester in the study. / On this beautiful night / she killed the forester.”
