Review of Urmel aus dem Eis

"Urmel aus dem Eis" is a German mini-series from 1969, so this one will soon have its 50th anniversary. And unlike other mini-series, you can actually watch this one easily in one sitting as it consists of 4 episodes of about half an hour each, which means that the entire thing is shorter than 2 hours. The director is Harald Schäfer and I think the original work is written by Max Kruse. Manfred Jenning is the one who adapted it and he is also one of the voice actors in here. I must say I am not familiar with any of the voice cast. It is a very fantasy-themed movie as none of the creatures or the fact that they can talk have anything to do with the real world. This is somewhat fine in terms of the idea of movie magic, but I must say the material here was not good enough for anything over 60 minutes. The characters are so many, yet they become all pretty uninteresting quickly and maybe less characters and better writing/elaboration on them would have made a batter film. And while the story early on with the other scientists was still good, the plot about the King (a hunter) being the main antagonist really dragged a lot and the ending (with everybody becoming friends after saving him from the cave) made all before that pretty pointless. I don't think this was a really bad watch, but most of the characters are style over substance and I also believe that there is a reason why films with string puppets don't get made anymore. It is an outdated concept and even here, in the late 1960s, it did not feel modern at all compared to other stuff I have seen from around that time. I give it a thumbs-down. Only worth checking out for really young audiences and even many of these probably won't like it.