_{Hideous Henk by Junaid Chundrigar}

“Watch out for artist Junaid Chundrigar! This tribute would be otherworldly in any galaxy!” the great Stan Lee, creator of Marvel, enthused on social media about the young Dutch animator. Lee had just seen, and had been wowed by Disassembled, Chundrigar’s animated parody of Marvel superheroes.

“Long story short, that was back in 2012. I was just hyped about the first Avengers film coming out. I made something silly in-between work [assignments] and it went viral,” Chundrigar remembers. Lee was so impressed that he got his company to contact the Dutch animator (who, at that stage, was not long out of film school). Lee and his team then turned the animated short into a YouTube series.

Ten years later, Chundrigar is still working non-stop and is one of the most prolific animators in the Netherlands.

Chundrigar will be at the Annecy Festival this summer to show an episode of his Hideous Henk series. This has been chosen for the TV competition. It’s about a pesky and bad-tempered little chihuahua who is forever getting into scrapes.

The cartoon bug bit Chundrigar early. “I used to make comics, but I also really liked to tell stories and tell jokes through editing,” the young cartoonist recalls. This led to animation and filmmaking, for which he quickly realised he had a real flair. That is what took him to the Utrecht School of the Arts, where he studied between 2007 and 2011.

Hideous Henk came into being in a roundabout way. In 2017, Chundrigar made Short But Sweet, a mini-epic about a young hero saving a princess which he describes as “Lord Of The Rings done in two minutes.” This was shown in Dutch cinemas alongside one of the Marvel movies.

Chris Stenger from Family Affair Films and writer Britt Snel admired the short. They approached the animator. “They contacted me, asking me if I would direct an animated [series],” Chundrigar explains how Henk first came to life.

The team won support through a pitching competition on Dutch TV to make a pilot. They then secured funding for the rest of the series.

The third episode is screening in Annecy. This is one of the most ambitious, partially set on a rubbish dump and featuring a huge number of different dogs of all breeds. Three animators (including Junaid) were working on the project. “Our team was very small compared to big budget TV shows and it felt as if we were making a small indie film all the time.”

Henk, the canine hero, or anti-hero, is small, ugly and very bad tempered. “He has the personality of an angry 50-year-old man who is grumpy all the time,” Junaid says of the feisty chihuahua. There is a comical contrast between how he looks and how he behaves. He is tiny but acts as if he is the boss.

Henk’s voice was provided by Junaid’s good friend Dennis Impink. “He is great at improvisational comedy. We also try to let him go loose when recording the voices…there are some things that you just have to let happen to keep the energy fresh.”

Visually, the film reflects the cartoons Junaid used to watch as a kid in the 1990s – such as Dexter’s Laboratory, Cow And Chicken and similar shows - on Cartoon Network. The sensibility, though, is very Dutch. The director talks of the “outlandish typical Dutch humour” that runs through the series. “The Dutch humour can be very silly, very rude. We felt that would be a good mix-up with the nostalgia we felt for those cartoons we grew up with. We thought let’s combine those things!”

Hideous Henk was produced through Family Affair Films. Junaid and his team launched a crowd funding campaign to get some extra financing which allowed them not to rush and “to finish it as best as we can.”

The director can’t hide his frustration at the lack of understanding about animation in the Netherlands. “They [the broadcasters] didn’t really understand how special and unique it was what we were making, and also how much time it takes…there are a lot of things that could be better. It’s a shame there aren’t people with greater animation experience in the higher management positions.”

Not that Junaid is allowing himself be held back. He remains as busy as ever and is currently hard at work on a short zombie film, Dooie Boel. He’s also open to the idea of working abroad, for example in the US, but doesn’t want to leave the Netherlands for good.

“Maybe temporarily,” he muses about leaving his home country but adds that the pandemic has taught everyone that “you can work from home!”
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