Les Moomins sur la Riviera

I am a big Moomin fan and this movie was just terrible. The only good thing about it was the cartoon drawing style, even I will always love the original Finnish moomins cartoon. The voice actors seemed to have no personality at all, or fit the characters they were doing the voices for, and the plot was boring i couldn't even finish the 30 minutes of the film. Highly disappointed.

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.

Just for you. Didnt want to break my promise.

legit the only movie that gave my child nightmares, besides when the horse dies in the neverending story.

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.

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?