Werner and the Wizard of Booze

The cartoonist Brösel, going about his life, is forced by a king to draw stories about the youth of his comic character Werner. The film combines live action with animation; Brösel's real life is filmed while the stories he draws are watched as animation. Werner has a long nose, a passion for motorbikes, and an unquenchable thirst for a drink called Bölkstoff. Niki List directed the live action and Gerhard Hahn and Michael Schaack the animation. Bernd Eichinger produced. The source is the Werner comics drawn by Rötger Feldmann under the name Brösel. Werner was a mass cultural event in the north of Germany. The comics sold in millions and the character's speech, jokes and drinking became a shared reference for a generation. The best known passage is the motorbike race, an animation of a race from the comics and the character's most cited scene. The humour is entirely local and tied to language; northern German speech, slang and regional jokes form its base. It opened on 29 November 1990 and was among the most watched German films of the period, with sequels following. It runs ninety three minutes. Who it is for: anyone curious about German comics culture and adult animation. Who it is not for: the humour is closed to an outside viewer, the structure is scattered, and the live action sections are markedly weaker than the animation.