Checkered Ninja

_Checkerboard Ninja_ starts off with a serial capitalist beating a child to death with a bamboo stick in a Thai sweat shop, then moves on to a couple of porn jokes and a pedophilia quip... Those Danes go really hard when it comes to kids' cartoons.

The message of confronting your fears and the avoidance of Disney level pap gives this CGI feature an edge that makes it a cut above the rest.

Don't watch the English dub, it's horrifically bad in basically every way. Aside from that... This is weirdly solid? The animation is pretty bad, sure, but when the story actually gets going, it manages to hit a lot of strong character beats, especially between the two main leads... Who are probably the only ACTUALLY compelling characters of the entire movie, since literally everyone else sucks (though the movie seems to know this). Also shout out to how... Insanely dark, mean-spirited, and genuinely twisted this film's script is. Apparently the Danish have a strongly dark sense of humor and as my first introduction to that, this... Certainly left an impression. On the whole... I weirdly kinda dug this? It genuinely does a lot with it's low budget, and anything with this unique of an identity in the animation industry deserves credit where it's due. Definitely flawed, maybe a bit too much for some people, but it might be worth seeking out if you have the patience for where its lacking.

This is weird... and incredibly cringeworthy a LOT of the time... but it's also an "adult" kids movie, which is a rare beast. Even if some of the humour is... kinda dark. On the plus side the relationship between the two main characters is really sweet.