Estonian

Klaus – an Estonian-born startup which emerged in 2019 to aid customer services agents – has been acquired by global customer services platform Zendesk for an undisclosed amount. Last year Zendesk also acquired Tymeshift, a workforce management tool, to fold into its product. It would be remiss of us not to mention that the downturn in the the overall tech economy and drop in valuations has certainly helped powered a wave of M&A in the sector. By the end, Klaus had raised a total of $19.3 million from investors…

Eastern Europe has a tradition of taking animation as a medium to unexpected places. And this gloriously unsavoury Estonian adventure certainly does so, in a madcap adventure that takes place, partly at least, in a bear’s stomach. The animation style is a crude stop motion, the characters have a single facial expression (wide-eyed, stricken, a bit deranged, in case you were wondering), the plot involves a race against time, for the Old Man and his grandchildren to rescue a prized cow from the murderous Old Milker, and to…

The only fitting comparison for this deranged Estonian stop-motion animation is if Shaun the Sheep had somehow been infected with a terminal case of BSE. The human characters are ugly lumpen golems, all the better to suggest rural backwardness; milk enjoys the same almost-ontological status here as Malkovichness in Being John Malkovich; the film has an unhealthy anal fixation that at one point expresses itself in a giant bear, irritated by a heavy-metal guitarist in his colon, who farts out an entire forestful of animals.…