Featuring the voice of Anders Matthesen. In Danish with English subtitles. Unrated. Plays Friday to Thursday, March 9 to 15, at the Vancity Theatre

Computer animation is racing ahead so rapidly that even casual observers of the phenomenon are likely to see Terkel in Trouble as a quaint artifact of, say, 2004-which is when it was, in fact, made. But although the characters and backgrounds here are about as technically advanced as those found in old episodes of Jimmy Neutron, none of Jimmy's pals, however, carried a lead pipe, said "Fuck that" to just about everything, or had a chopper-riding grandpa known for beating the crap out of kids.

Although a version of Terkel was subsequently released in the U.K., with top British comics providing the voices-and certainly no kind of cinema lends itself better to dubbing than do cartoons-it's worth catching the original, with creator Anders Matthesen, a popular figure on Danish radio, voicing most of his creations himself. As narrator, he keeps showing up-bearded and with a dopey bowl cut-as schoolgirls and bus drivers, usually beginning his sentences with "Anyways" in English.

Terkel himself is a fairly ordinary 11-year-old, tormented by bullies and saddled with an annoying little sister, a walking ashtray of a mother, and a dad who literally knows no word other than no. Things look up when Terkel's class gets a new substitute teacher (after their regular one had a suitably gruesome death, of course) whose progressive ways appear to lift the spirits of cynical grade fivers-at least until a class camping trip proves less healthy than expected.

The film's grotesque, foul-mouthed humour won't be to everyone's liking. I mean, if you can't take kids to a cartoon, what good is it, right? Still, this Trouble has a playfully anarchic quality that recaptures the nasty-funny parts of childhood that were definitely there, even if Disney and Pixar don't seem to remember them. The musical number is more fun than Randy Newman, too.