Caroline, Coco and the Wild Rhinoceros – Cirkeline, Coco og det vilde næsehorn (2018)

Directed by: Jannik Hastrup | 60 minutes | animation, family | Original voice cast: Magdalena Nonsgjogv Trantou, Yasmin Cekic, Efe Vinter Alis, Estrid Lauritsen Böttiger, Peter Ellekrog, Peter Larsen, Anne Marie Helger, Tommy Kenter, Andreas Bo Pedersen, Flemming Quist Møller

In Denmark she is a household name: Cirkeline. The tiny girl with her red dress with black dots, her wispy hair and her mouse friends Fredrik and Ingolf, who sleeps in a matchbox, prefers to walk barefoot and has exciting adventures (for small children) was created in the late 1950s by Hanne Hastrup . In the decades that followed, numerous booklets were published about the girl – the first in 1969 – and her boyfriends, and between 1968 and 1971 Hannes’s then-husband Jannik Hastrup directed a series of eighteen short animated films about Cirkeline for Danish television. In 1998 she made her move to the silver screen; two new film parts followed in 2000 and 2004. A new TV series followed in 2011. In 2019, Cirkeline is still popular, at least in Denmark and other Scandinavian countries. The elfin girl even has her own app and a sizable following on Facebook. The Hastrup couple, who have been divorced for years, are responding to this with a brand new Cirkeline film: ‘Cirkeline, Coco og det vilde naesehorn’ (2018), a nostalgic animation film that is released in the Netherlands under the title ‘Caroline, Coco and the wild rhinoceros’. For the sake of recognisability, we will refer to Cirkeline in the remainder of this review as Caroline.

In this new adventure, Caroline meets Coco, the girl depicted on a pack of cocoa powder. Caroline thinks they look alike and would love to be friends with the girl. Her wish is fulfilled, because the next day she appears to have climbed off the suit. A small rhinoceros that they call Oswald also manages to break free from the suit. Coco is a princess from Africa, she comes from the country ‘where the chocolate grows on the trees’ and Caroline, Fredrik and Ingolf also want to go there. Oswald is especially lonely and longs for his mother, whom he hasn’t seen in a long time (has he ever seen her at all?). The grumpy grandfather of Caroline’s mouse friends has a plane and takes the colorful company on a journey. When they get their feet back on the ground, they think they are in Africa: there is thick vegetation, wild animals live there and there are adventures to experience. While Oswald and Ingolf search for Oswald’s mother, Caroline, Coco and Fredrik encounter a family of mice terrorized by two rats, who come on behalf of the dreaded Arnold to collect the chocolate balls that they carefully extract from the cocoa beans every day. In reality, Arnold turns out to be a depressed wild rhinoceros who tries to ‘eat away’ his boredom and loneliness and has no idea how the rats have everyone – including him – in their grip.

‘Caroline, Coco and the wild rhinoceros’ exudes pure nostalgia. The animations not only look dated and simple, but also wooden. Caroline hasn’t changed a bit in all those years and so still looks like the first movies, which date from the late sixties. For the spoiled, twenty-first-century film viewer, that is a shortcoming, but with a little good will you can also see it as the charm of this film. Especially for the very young it doesn’t matter that outdated animation techniques are used, as long as there is something to experience. The story is not very startling, at least if you look at it with an adult eye. But there is plenty going on for children between the ages of two and six. There are still attempts to incorporate some jokes for the watching parents in the film, including a short moment that makes fun of the simplified animation style (one of the mice is asked why his eyes are on the same side). A reference to the Danish writer Karen Blixen (1885-1962), who often spent her life in Africa and wrote about it, will not be picked up by everyone. Other than that, it’s all pretty straightforward, with little humor and characters with simplified emotions. For the little ones, which this film primarily focuses on, it doesn’t matter. The adventure of Caroline and her friends, and the theme of looking for where you come from, is enough entertainment for them. Watching adults have to content themselves with the old-fashioned charm of this film, which looks like it dates from their childhood.