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4
FILM
“Christmas with Astrid Lindgren”
Director: Are Austnes & Yaprak Morali
Norway/Sweden – 2023
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Every odd year Christmas seems to come a little earlier than before, and this year it starts at the same time as Halloween. So I guess that means Christmas cookies and marzipan pigs are now in there as ‘snop or snazz’ candies. Recently, the Norwegian cartoon “Pulverheksa’s magical Christmas” premiered, and now comes “Christmas with Astrid Lindgren”. Produced by Norway’s leading supplier of family-friendly computer animations: Qvisten Animation, which has distinguished itself with, among other things, “Solan and Ludvig: Here to Flåklypa” (2015), “Animals in Hakkebakkeskogen” (2016) and “Captain Sabertooth and the Magical Diamond” ( 2019).
The studio will soon be at the cinema with Tommy Wirkola’s “Spermageddon”, which may not be made like child-friendly. However, “Christmas with Astrid Lindgren” is not a cinema film at all, really. It is a cavalcade program created for Swedish TV, which first showed “Christmas with Astrid Lindgren” on Christmas Eve last year. The reactions among Swedish TV viewers were a good mix of resignation and pure hostility, mostly because many feared that this program had been pryed into the broadcast schedule as a future replacement for “Kalle Anka och hans vänner oskarn God Jul”. A cartoon program that has been a central part of Swedish Christmas traditions ever since 1960, and is still the most watched TV program in Swedish history.
Here at home, these traditions were created a couple of generations later, after NRK started showing the Norwegian version “Donald Duck and his friends wish you a merry Christmas” on Christmas Eve in 1979. The Christmas holiday is one of the few times when the whole family can still be inclined to to gather around linear TV, while elderly relatives insist that everyone dutifully must watch old NRK trotters such as Donald, the Silver Boys, Cinderella and her three nuts.
However, changes in TV habits, the threat from streaming channels and increasingly expensive Disney rights can pose a danger to old traditions, so the bosses at Sveriges Television started work to find an emergency solution that future-proofed the Christmas celebration. The strategy was to “create new collective memories and a new TV tradition” that gathered the Swedish people around the TV sets to watch a similar program spun around the national symbol Astrid Lindgren. For these purposes, they had to get Norwegian help, and recruited the animation studio Qvisten to produce an hour-long Christmas program following the same pattern as “Donald Duck and his friends”. A collection of Christmas animated films based on Lindgren’s cozy stories, loosely bound together by a frame story with Swedish actors.
Here at home, of course, everything is dubbed in Norwegian, and the stilted voicing unfortunately becomes a burden already in the run-up – with all that entails from well-grown regional theater actors with strained, strained voices and awkward children. The night before Christmas Eve, the siblings Gunilla (Cornelia Dahl) and Gunnar (Ingmar Grip) have come down with a cold, so the parents (Vilhelm Blomgren and Cecilia Forss) give the children an early Christmas present to keep them calm. Exactly what all kids want most: a cuckoo clock!
Inside, a computer-animated crab hides: Merry Cuckoo, which pops out to tell the kids adventures. First up is the cartoon “Snøballkrigen i Katthult”, where the parents of the rake kid Emil have invited all the prominent residents of the village for Christmas coffee. Papa Anton gives Emil a stern warning that he will not tolerate mischief, but the situation spirals out of control after the children start a snowball fight. This cartoon is more slapstick than most Emil adaptations, with simple (slash primitive) animation in the style of Björn Berg’s illustrations from the books.
The next short film is based on the Lindgren fairy tale “Per Pusling moves in”, and is computer-animated in Pixar style. The anxious boy Kjell has to be all alone while his poor parents work in a factory, but finds a best friend in the miniature boy Per Pusling – who has moved into a mouse hole under his bed. In “The Fox and the Santa”, a ravenous fox gets to know a kind barnyard Santa, who promises to share the Christmas porridge if he stays away from the hen house (that short film was created back in 2020, commissioned by The Astrid Lindgren Company).
Then the energetic six-year-old Kajsa Krabat has to stand up to save the Christmas celebration after grandma breaks her foot, and you shouldn’t completely ignore the fact that the beaked cuckoo’s stories also save Christmas for the children with a cold. Someone should really check if cuckoo also works as a cure for Covid. While “Donald Duck and his friends wish you a merry Christmas” is aimed at all age groups (and is probably most popular among grown-up nostalgics), “Christmas with Astrid Lindgren” is aimed at the youngest children.
It is hard to imagine that this will have huge appeal for especially many over the age of six, or has what it takes to become a future Christmas tradition. Some of the short films work better than others (“Per Pusling” is the most polished, “Kajsa Krabat” is equipped with the most natural dubbing track), and most are really cozy – but all feel very condensed, and mostly a vague sketch of Lindgren’s stories.
The Qvisten studio has animated them all in different styles, ensuring that each one has its own distinct character. It should be mentioned that the original Swedish version also included Christmas-related clips from older Lindgren series with Pippi Longstocking and Tjorven, but they have been removed from the Norwegian cinema edition. I can’t claim that “Christmas with Astrid Lindgren” works optimally as a Donald substitute, a full-fledged cinema film rather than a celebration of Lindgren’s significant cultural heritage, but as a digital delivery system for early Christmas spirit, this is still a pleasant hour for the little ones.