Authenticity has increasingly become a buzzword for upmarket movies with real actors—now cartoons are following suit and pushing staged reality to the extreme. Kein Platz für Gerold appears to have been made with a shaky handheld camera: the lighting is “natural”; and the performances, absolutely realistic. Over the past years, countless attempts have been made to stage movies with real actors that resemble documentaries. Animated films, which are made frame by frame, are even further away from documentaries and so all the more suited to play with artificially generated “reality”.

The film revolves in content around an unspectacular everyday situation. As if by chance, a handheld camera is in a flat shared by animals and captures a scene such as takes place a thousand and one times a day between rhinos, crocs, gnus and hippos in German kitchens. Animal heads molded out of Plasticine are the basis of these striking digitized protagonists. Wrapped in realistic textures and provided with a skeleton system for the animation, the computer characters have been evolved from hand-drawn model sheets.

The story consistently proceeds from the premise that there is a unity of time and place. Everything is set in the kitchen of a shared flat. Authenticity has also been the top priority in its décor. The kitchen of this shared flat is suppose to look like it would in real-life. Typical for such a kitchen is that it lacks design, which means it is a question of making it look undesigned. The lighting is also natural and non-aesthetic. The visuals thrive on chance—as is the case in most amateur films.

The characters’ facial expressions and gestures are less expressive and exaggerated than is usual for a cartoon. The animals are suppose to move more like real humans. It is a matter of small subtle movements. In contrast to in other animation technologies, subtlety is a strength of computer animation, though it is rarely used. The true-to-life effect of the animation is underscored by the camerawork. The virtual camera wobbles in the hands of the videomaker. It zooms and pans without restraint and often reacts a bit too late to what is happening.