The Animated Feature Contenders: Moomins on the Riviera
Friday, December 4, 2015 at 9:30PM Tim here. Every December, Tim's Toons preps for the upcoming Oscar nominations in January by looking at some of the smaller and more easily overlooked films that have thrown their hat in the ring for the Best Animated Feature Oscar. It's a slim list of 16 titles this year, which means that if even one of them fails to meet the eligibility requirements (they don't all appear to have had their qualifying theatrical run yet), we wouldn’t have a year with five nominees. Something to think about as you all work on your nomination predictions.
Let’s turn now to one of those films that almost certainly won't make the cut no matter how many nominees end up happening, through absolutely no fault of its own. Moomins on the Riviera is a slight, charming, and deeply silly comedy adapting an iconic Finnish comic strip and children’s book series, quite obscure in America, about a family of trolls that look rather like hippopotamuses with no mouths. The film itself is a French-Finnish co-production, and it feels like both of those nationalities are in play; the music and coloring feel significantly gallic, the story and designs have a definite Nordic tang (director Xavier Picard and co-director Hanna Hemilä are from the two respective countries, uncoincidentally).
The story, meanwhile, taken from Swedish-speaking Finn Tove Jansson's comics, is pure uncut childish frivolity (the Best Animated Feature category as a whole is distinctly juvenile this year). The Moomins – Moomin (Russell Tovey in the English dub), Moominmamma (Trace Ann Oberman), Moominpappa (Nathaniel Parker), and Moomin’s girlfriend Snorkmaiden (Stephanie Winiecki) – have an extraordinarily low-key run-in with some pirates, after which they rescue the tiny, bratty human girl Little My (Ruth Gibson). With one sea adventure having gone well, the gang agrees to another, and in no time at all they're battling storms and taking a tiny sailboat across the ocean to the Riviera. There, they have run-ins with haughty celebrities, snooty hotel staff, daffy artists and oblivious art collectors, and generally move with gentle, deliberate slowness through one of the kindest fish-out-of-water comedies I have ever seen.
From a quick tour of the internet, it would seem that diehard Moomin fans have generally found the movie lacking; for myself, with absolutely no investment in the characters whatsoever, I thought it was all disarmingly sweet, with its almost hypnotic lack of stakes. The Moomins themselves so naïve and free of malice or virtually any negative emotion (Moomin is jealous of Snorkmaiden's flirtations with a movie star; that is the entirety of the film's interpersonal conflict) that it's hard to imagine anything bad or more than modestly inconvenient happening to them, and the whole movie turns out to be as soft and rounded as the protagonists.
That's not a bad thing, even if Moomins on the Riviera is a movie about which nothing outlandishly enthusiastic can be said ("Slight! …An almost hypnotic lack of stakes! -Tim Brayton, Film Experience" isn't a pullquote one would expect to see on the DVD). It's got some creakiness in a lot of places, especially around the anachronistic characterization of Snorkmaiden as a shallow flirt, but much more of the film is pleasant in its smallness rather than otherwise. It's a film to be recommended to parents with a small child, and probably nobody else – but the small children need sincere, well-mounted, generous-in-spirit movies, just like the rest of us.
The anti-edgy softness extends to the visuals, as well. Working very hard to copy Jansson's art style into animation, the film favors smooth lines and soft colors, though only the Moomins themselves are so harmlessly round. Most of the figures they meet on the Riviera are angular and gangly, a neat visual contrast that effortlessly sets up the film-defining disjunction between the characters and their setting.
It's a cliché to say that it looks like a picture book come to life, especially since that is in a very real sense precisely what it is. But a calming, lovely picture book, one that you like to just stare at and let your eyes wander over the utterly simplistic but still thoroughly expressive faces of the Moomins, lingering on the soft green trees, soft blue water, soft orange skies.
It's a kids' movie, and not even one for particularly old kids at that. Let's make that fact entirely clear. But it's still awfully nice, and awfully satisfying as a short, pleasant visit with some mostly charming, genially goofy hosts.
Oscar prospects: Minuscule. I don't think it's in last place out of the 16 or anything like, but these tiny little European confections need a major distributor push to get even a whisper of awards attention, and Moomins doesn't have any.
Reader Comments (3)
I look forward to watching this, though it's Jansson's novels and novellas from her Moomin franchise that really earned my slavish devotion more so than the comparatively slight and jokey comic strips.
The last four Moomin books are some of the all time greatest achievements children's literature: gentle yet emotionally ambitious stories driven by sharply etched characters and a fascination with what it means to be lonely, the challenge of feeling at home in a community, the relationship with the sublime, and so many other ideas we mistakenly assume would be lost on children.
Though I imagine the final book "Moominvalley in November" likely does alienate much of the younger audience. It focuses on what happens when a bunch of unfamiliar or minor characters arrive in Moominvalley, only for the Moomin family to be missing for the entire book, leaving the ensemble to attempt to slowly pull themselves at least a little way out from isolation and confusion. All of these later books abandon the brisk pace and incident heavy structure of most children's fantasy, choosing to instead focus on conjuring up rich characters and a mood defined not just by melancholy and quiet introspection, but also a love of wit, empathy, anarchism, and the feeling of setting off into the wilderness and returning home at night.
"The quiet transition from autumn to winter is not a bad time at all. It's a time for protecting and securing things and for making sure you've got in as many supplies as you can. It's nice to gather together everything you possess as close to you as possible, to store up your warmth and your thoughts and burrow yourself into a deep hole inside, a core of safety where you can defend what is important and precious and your very own. Then the cold and the storms and the darkness can do their worst. They can grope their way up the walls looking for a way in, but they won't find one, everything is shut, and you sit inside, laughing in your warmth and your solitude, for you have had foresight."
i'm curious now. i've been getting emails about it. should watch.
I loved the books as a kid in the 1970s, and I had little idea this film existed. But Russell Tovey! I may just have to track it down...