'Checkered Ninja' Movie Review

Most movies about a kid finding a magic toy go one of two ways. The toy is a friend who teaches life lessons, or the toy is evil and the kid runs from it. Checkered Ninja does something stranger. The toy is friendly, the toy is murderous, and both things are true at the same time. Aske (renamed Alex in the English dub) gets the doll for his thirteenth birthday from his uncle Stewart, who picked it up on a trip to Thailand. The doll comes alive. The doll kills people. The doll also gives genuinely good advice about how to talk to your crush.

If that sounds tonally insane, that's the point.

This is a 2018 Danish animated film, directed by Anders Matthesen and Thorbjørn Christoffersen, based on Matthesen's own novel. Matthesen is a stand-up comedian and rapper who basically built the film around his own voice (literally, he voices the Ninja and several other characters), and it shows. The dialogue moves like comedy. The pacing moves like a comic's set. There isn't a single moment where you can tell what genre you're in, and it kind of works.

Here's what's unusual about it. The opening scene is a Danish businessman beating a child sweatshop worker to death in Thailand. That is the inciting event. That is where the doll gets possessed. That is in a movie that won three Robert Awards (Denmark's Oscars), including Best Children's Film, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Song. So already, you should adjust your expectations. This is not a kids' film. It picked up a kids' film award because Denmark, apparently, has different ideas about what thirteen-year-olds can handle. The Hollywood Reporter's Jordan Mintzner called it "clever and a bit crude," and that's being kind. There are jokes about a stepfather's porn magazine. There is a song called "Pesto." There is a cocaine reference within the first twenty minutes.

And then there's the heart of it, which is what nobody warns you about. Aske is a bullied seventh grader with a step-family he doesn't quite fit into and a crush named Jessica he can't talk to. The Ninja, even while plotting his revenge against a toy CEO named Phillip Eppermint, becomes the friend Aske doesn't have. The voice mimicry gag (the doll can perfectly impersonate anyone) starts as a comedy bit and slowly becomes something else. It's the way Aske learns to use his own voice instead of borrowing the Ninja's. Coming-of-age stuff. It just happens to be wrapped around a vendetta plot.

The animation is the other thing worth flagging. Made on a tight budget of around 8 million Danish kroner (roughly 1.3 million US dollars, which is a rounding error compared to Pixar), the film looks bigger than it is. Christoffersen, who served as supervising animator and previously worked on Ronal the Barbarian, designs the Ninja as half cuddly and half deadly. The fight scenes are energetic and weirdly beautiful. The factory and school environments feel grounded, which makes the cartoonish violence land harder by contrast.

The English dub deserves a separate mention. Released in 2019, it was recorded in Ireland with an Irish cast (handled by Moetion Films), with Alfred Bjerre Larsen voicing Alex and Anders Matthesen himself reprising the Ninja in English. Most international dubs flatten a film. This one mostly survives, partly because Matthesen wrote rap-parody songs that work nearly as well in English as in Danish (Waqas Qadri and Jimmy Antony handle the English vocals), and partly because the Irish cast plays the comedy without trying to make it American.

What doesn't work? Some of the broader comedy beats land in places where the film could've stayed quieter. There's a Stewart Stardust subplot, a returning character from Matthesen's earlier film Terkel in Trouble (2004), that fans of that earlier work will eat up but newcomers might find a little baffling. The pacing also wobbles in the middle stretch, where the comedy and the revenge plot start tugging in different directions, before the third act snaps everything back together.

A few things to watch for. The Ninja's voice mimicry, set up early as a gag, quietly becomes the emotional payoff later. The score, by Christian Vinten, threads through Matthesen's six original songs in ways that feel more cohesive than most animated soundtracks (the songs were produced by Kewan Padré, if you're the kind of person who reads credits). There's also a dart hitting a poster of a comedian in one early scene, a real-life sly jab at one of Matthesen's actual rivals on the Danish stand-up circuit. Most international viewers will miss it. And watch how often the camera lingers on the Ninja's face when nobody else is looking. For a doll with painted-on features, he's doing a lot.

The numbers tell their own story. The film sold around 950,000 tickets in Denmark, making it the highest-grossing Danish film since 1986. It also triggered a sequel in 2021 that broke its own opening weekend record, and a third film arrived in 2025. Whatever Matthesen and Christoffersen are doing here, Danish audiences keep showing up.

Watch it because it shouldn't work and it does. Watch it because it's a kids' film that's not for kids, a coming-of-age story that's also a slasher comedy, and a Danish phenomenon that somehow holds together long enough to make you laugh, wince, and root for a stuffed toy with a kill list. There isn't another animated film from the last decade that even resembles it. That alone is worth the eighty-three minutes.