COLOGNE, Germany – German cult comic book author Walter Moers has launched a crowd funding campaign to make a feature film version of his most controversial comic series: the Hitler satire Adolf.
The first book in the series, Adolf, die Nazisau (Adolf, the Nazi Sow), released in 1998, was a major bestseller in Germany. An animated video based on the series released in 2006 and featuring a toilet-bound Hitler singing about life in the bunker, was an online sensation – recording more than 20 million views on YouTube and other sites.
Now Mores is looking to take his bulbous-nosed Adolf to the big screen. Together with producer David Groenewold (The Wave), he has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for a feature film based on the comics.
In the teaser video for the film, uploaded on Monday, the cartoon Adolf is about to address a huge crowd of Nazi supporters, only to release he has forgot his trousers.
According to the official production site, the producers have raised more than $6,000 from just 137 supporters. The online campaign is set to run through mid-February 2013.
In Moers’ Adolf comics, the Fuhrer emerges after decades in hiding underground and tries to adjust to the modern world. He takes up Zen to tame his genocidal tendencies but reverts to type and is inadvertently responsible for the deaths of – among others – Kurt Cobain and Lady Di.
Moers is one of Germany’s most successful authors and comic book artists and his work has been adapted numerous times for film and TV. The feature film version of his politically-incorrect cartoon Kleines Arschloch (Little Asshole) took in more than $20 million at the German box office in 1997. The 2006 sequel, however, brought in just $1.2 million. Moers’ children’s series Captain Bluebear, about a tall-tale-telling ursine sea captain and his dim-witted first mate, has been successfully adapted both for TV and, in 1999, as a feature film which earned around $6 million locally.
