Valhalla (1986) – style over substance [written review]

Recently, I watched the Danish animated film Valhalla for the first time. Based on a series of comic books by the same name, Valhalla is famous both for establishing a national animation film industry in Denmark and for losing a lot of money.
 
The comic books (which have been published in many languages, including English) tell stories of the Asgardian gods, mainly focussing on Thor and Loki. The stories and characters are vaguely based on traditional Nordic mythology, but are light and humorous in tone.
 
With the comic books having been published since 1979, plans emerged in the mid 1980 to create an animated feature film based on the books. The project run into various difficulties, lost its director (Jeffrey James Varab) along the way, and exceeded its budget by an estimated 100 to 200 per cent. The main artist behind the comic books, Peter Madsen, stepped in and is credited as director for the finished film. Together with the other comic book artists, Madsen is also credited for the source material, but only Madsen and his colleague Henning Kure wrote the screenplay.
 

The story begins simple enough: the Asgardian gods like to visit Midgard (Earth) from time to time, and on one such visit Thor and Loki end up taking two human children (Tjalvi and his sister Röskva) back to Asgard with them. The two children work as servants in the household, since Thor’s wife has her hands full dealing with her two babies. The household becomes even more chaotic when Loki brings a troll child by the name of Quark into the house shortly thereafter. The rest of the film deals with the fall-out of Quark’s arrival, but unfortunately no real story develops.
 

In short, the story is a complete mess. There is no three-act structure; this 76-minute feature film has at least five short acts, with little coherence but massive pacing issues. The climactic scenes of the film come very late and do not amount to much. And the film’s ending is appallingly immaterial. Maybe the problem started with picking several story-ideas from several different issues of the comic book series and trying to put them all into the film. Or maybe the troubled production threw the film off balance and contributed to the incoherent plot.
 
All of this is a huge shame, because the animation is lovely, and the whole design is beautiful and well-thought through. The characters are also great and rather well-written. It is just that the film does not do anything with them.
 
The film features a nice score by legendary composer Ron Goodwin. And for trivia fans I will add the information that none other than Christopher Lee voiced Thor in the German dubbed version of the film (but not in the English one).
 
 
If I had to rate the audacity to launch such a project in a small country like Denmark, and the achievement to actually see this project to completion, I would rate it at 7 out of 10.
If I had to rate the design and the style of the animation, I would possibly rate it as high as 8 out of 10.
The story however, which is still the most important aspect in any film, cannot be rated higher than 2 out of 10.