Moomins on the Riviera

A beautifully animated but rather baggy attempt at bringing the classic Tove books to life. Careful attention has been paid to replicating the style of the original inkwork - and with a lovely muted palette, the background scenes are by-and-large stunning, especially in Moominvalley itself.

Unfortunately it meanders so aimlessly as a plot that by the hour mark it feels quite exhaustingly disconnected like a flimsy Saturday morning cartoon stretched beyond its natural limits. Plaudits to be handed out for its dedication to the original more-satirical Moomin comic strips but in doing so whilst sticking to a languid and simplistic pace it ends up too babyish for adult audiences and too bizarrely adult for children's audiences. A bit of a beautiful muddle really that leaves it as a strange European curio rather than a vital bit of Moominery and really a damned shame.

Great drawings, pretty music. The movie is an adaptation of a comic strip segment of the same name, published in 1955, (while hinting at other storylines from Janssons comics and books, mostly in the first act.) I imagine this should have been both more and less faithful to the source material. It sticks, for the most part, very close to the comics, and the pacing suffers for it, yet, what they did change or add makes it even worse (apart from the opening titles, featuring everyone's darling character.) The dialogue is for some reason subtly less moominous and witty, and Moominmama gets a couple moments of character-assassination. The main problem seems to be directorial and possibly editorial. There's no energy to the acting, no rhythm in the exchanges. I suspect someone very much wanted the product to be feature-length, which could have been a good thing, but instead of using that extra time to make the main plot more cohesive and engaging, they padded with unrelated story-material. I imagine this could have felt like a wonderful mix of Per Åhlin, Sylvain Chomet and the cute side of Cartoon Network. The creators went to great lenghts to copy and give life to the comic strip-drawings, and ended up with a moving comic strip.

Beautiful backgrounds and colour design, but everything else was bad. I didn't like the movie much at all.

The script, voice acting and pacing/storytelling were especially bad. Also the character animation was mediocre and lifeless.

It desperately needed a proper English localisation & casting/voice direction, or just leave it in Finnish/Swedish with subs.The English voices were fairly weak, especially Moomin himself.

I thought the script was lazy and messy - the way they throw in Tove Jansson quotes/jokes with no context or the wrong context annoyed me so much. They didn't turn the material into a movie script at all.

Note: I'm a big Moomin fan AND very critical of animated movies so maybe other people would like it way more than me?

P.S You know what? If you're a Moomin fan, the movie -IS- worth seeing, for the opening titles with Snufkin alone.

Visually the cartoon was OK, but it totally ignored any number of excellent plots from the originals.

Had pirates, except they behaved absurdly. And did not fit.

Then sent them to the Riviera, where they were obviously out of place.

A complete botch.

Why does no one in the world of commercial cinema accept that a successful original is best treated with respect?

I so wanted to like this film. The books, the fuzzy-felt TV series, even the newer young children's books are all fabulous.

Presumably the original Finnish version is up to scratch. Visually it's great, the music's pretty good. The English version though is appalling. The translation is dry and humourless and voice acting poor. Where is the subtle characterisation of the originals - shouldn't the Snorkmaiden be coquettish and slightly insecure rather than just a cow? I do a better Moominpappa reading the stories to my boy than the voice actor here.

The worst thing is that this vandalism must have been done by a team that just don't "get" the Moomins. They should be treasured, not treated like this.