Last year HFPA members screened fifteen animated features, which qualified for Golden Globes nominations. Among them was the Finnish feature Moomins on the Riviera based on the beloved characters created by Tove Jansson. Erkki Kanto spoke with the film’s producer, Hanna Hemilä.

While not very well known in the U.S., the Moomins are beloved by children and fans around the world. These gentle hearted hippo-like benevolent forest trolls are now part of a Nordic publishing, film and television mythology. Their new film Moomins on the Riviera is nothing new in the history of these delightful cartoon characters. The creator, Tove Jansson, a Swedish speaking Finnish writer and artist was born in 1914 in Helsinki, at that time part of the Grand Duchy of Finland, Russian Empire. Her whole family was creative: her father a sculptor, her mother a graphic designer and illustrator, her siblings are respectively a photographer, an author and a cartoonist. Around the 1950s Tove Jansson became world famous for her books about the Moomin family, and the cartoons that she subsequently drew.

The producer of the Moomins on the Riviera, Hanna Hemilä, says the film based on the Tove Jansson cartoons started to take shape when she spoke with her friend Sofia Jansson, the niece and current manager of Tove Jansson’s decades of work, one beautiful summer day in Finland. “It was the year 2010, we were swimming and suddenly Sofia said that it is really too bad nobody has really been interested in Tove’s original cartoons. She acknowledged that the famous writer’s books and novels had been made into film and television, but not the original cartoons. I suggested why don’t I contact a really gifted director in France and see if he wants to work for the project, we can do that. I then contacted director Xavier Picard, explained the idea of a Moomin movie based on the cartoons, and soon we had a plan that Sofia accepted.”

The movie has sold to 50 different countries around the world. But getting the funding was not the easiest task, Hemilä states. “At first, when I told them the movie will be about the famous cartoons of the Moomin family, they were really excited. But when I went on and informed them that it will be done the old fashioned way with hand-drawn cartoons, their reply was ‘Oh, no. We only do 3-D!’ So, we got really worried, but finally all went extremely well. We found out that there still is a very large community of people who appreciate the carefully hand drawn 2-D cartoons.”

Erkki Kanto