Reviews

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.