When 9-year-old Babs receives a twinkly-eyed piglet as a birthday gift from her grandfather, the household is thrown into disarray in Mascha Halberstad’s amiable new animated feature, Oink (Knor), which opens the Generation K Plus strand of this year’s Berlinale. This is a heart-warming tale of a burgeoning friendship between a little girl and her new porcine companion set against the backdrop of a local sausage contest that manages to be both a chaotic farce and to gently prod home its worthy message about meat consumption without laying it on so thickly that it gets stuck in your craw.
Before our eponymous curly-tailed mischief-maker has even arrived on the scene, we get an introduction to the battle to be crowned King Sausage. Back in the 1990s, two butchers – Smakkerelli and Tuitjes – came to blows over some scurrilous cheating by the latter, brought the competition into disrepute, and were banned from entering for 25 years. A quarter of a century later, Tuitjes arrives back in town to stay with his daughter and granddaughter, Babs, just a few short weeks before the year’s event. When Babs’ parents say she can’t have a puppy for her birthday, Tuitjes goes and gets her a pet piglet, which she names Oink, but suspicion remains about her grandpa’s motives.
Oink’s comedy is broad and gentle. There’s a great deal of pig excrement flying around – one of Oink’s defining behavioural traits is an inability to control his bowels – which should entertain younger viewers but it’s fairly well deployed throughout. There’s a moment of faecal humour in the finale that is very well-signposted but somehow still manages to be disarmingly funny. Elsewhere there is a distinct lack of snarky jokes or those aimed squarely at adults that people might have come to expect in much of children’s animation. Instead, there are oddly surreal and quietly comical moments, motifs, and sight gags – from Tuitjes’ cowboy getup to a feat of unexpected strength by Babs’ dad – that need to be noticed in the detail.
That detail is also key to an appreciation of the stop-motion puppet animation which is filled with small incidental touches that bring a smile to the face amidst its generally gorgeous veneer. It’s all meticulously crafted to the point where it has an almost hyper-real quality, and the cinematography by Peter Mansfelt helps to create a sense, in certain moments, that you’re not even watching animation. This is also helped by quite a contained and relatively unspectacular story and the aesthetic may feel reminiscent of the work of Aardman Animations to viewers familiar with their Wallace and Gromit films and Shaun the Sheep spin-offs. It’s partly a result of a setting that ranges from suburbia to the semi-rural, a world populated by twee local produce shows and lovingly tended vegetable gardens, as well as its undeniably cute four-legged star, who is less knowingly cheeky than Shaun but has a similar knack for the slapstick. It is also a result of what is effectively an intimate family drama, albeit one that revolves around a pig.
What is also quite impressive about the balancing of tone in Oink, is that it keeps both its comedy and drama quite light, meaning they flow nicely into one another without jarring. At the same time, it never feels hand-wringing in its engagement with the issue of carnivorousness. This is primarily because, while its underlying position is one of ardent vegetarianism, its narrative is about an explicitly personal relationship that it’s impossible not to be charmed by. While the takeaway might be ‘don’t eat meat,’ the thrust of the story is ‘don’t hurt Oink.’ To say that makes it more powerful might be overstating things, but it makes it more palatable and any animal lovers with a penchant for exquisite animation and an abundance of dung should be as happy as pigs in muck.
Director, editor: Mascha Halberstad
Screenplay: Fiona van Heemstra
Voice cast: Hiba Ghafry, Matsen Montsma, Kees Prins, Jelka van Houten
Producer: Marleen Slot
Cinematography: Peter Mansfelt
Animation: Jasper Kuipers, Marike Verbiest, Mirjam Plettinx, Iris Alexandre, Quentin Haberham, Raymon Wittenberg, Zaou Vaughan
Music: Rutger Reinders
Sound: Jan Schermer
Production companies: Viking Film (Netherlands)
World sales: LevelK
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Generation K Plus)
In Dutch
72 minutes
