“[Set designer Achim] Freyer was never satisfied by conventional material, and in the history of GDR animated films he was something of a radical innovator. For the anti-war parable Heinrich, the Wannabe King (1965), he designed, in a manner similar to the legendary staging of Brecht's Mother Courage and her Children, almost bare scenery with nothing but the outlines of old maps shimmering through. The army, with which the eponymous hero, a German prince from the 15th century, heads off to conquer Poland, is metaphorically reduced to a single eight-legged horse with five riders. Heinrich himself appears as a wandering set of armor with rosy, porky cheeks and much too skinny legs. Several figures have double heads that smile at the front and look wicked or mean-spirited at the back. The backdrop to this conquest consists of rusty metal parts. The viewer sees a meadow made of nails with the heads of screws as flowers. This gives the film a corresponding severity. The city of Krakow appears in the form of an unconquerable fortress. Its entrance is made of two egg boxes. To coherently reduce the world in a metaphoric manner that indicates the nature of the universe being displayed is something in which no DEFA animated film had hitherto succeeded.”   —Ralf Schenk, “In Defense of Imagination – Kurt Weiler and His Films”