Werner - Eiskalt! (2011)

The famous but impoverished comic artist Brösel was working on his 13th installment featuring the character “Werner,” but his publisher refused to release it because manga had since taken over the market. Disappointed, Brösel drives to Corsica. On the beach, he tries to impress the bathing beauties Mandy and Barbara with a “Flachköpper”—a headfirst dive into water only knee-deep—but apparently loses his life in the process. His body ends up in the morgue’s refrigerated room, but his spirit continues to take part in events. When his money-hungry publisher Seidel learns of the accident in Kiel, he steals Brösel’s latest drawings so he can cash in on his death. Meanwhile, Brösel’s friends Präsi, Herbert, Röhre, Walze and Holgi, along with Brösel’s brother Andi, from the northern German town of “Knöllerup”—all of whom Brösel has immortalized in his drawings over the past 30 years—steal Brösel’s body in a covert nighttime operation to take it back home. Brösel himself and all the other characters recall his work about Werner, the character in whom he sees himself, and the rivalry between him and his school friend Holgi. It begins when they are children, continues with the race and the event at Hartenholm airfield, and will probably never end. Numerous animated sequences referring to Feldmann’s entire body of work are woven into this framing story.