Moominland, from Finland to Poland to Japan (video essay, transcript in article)

Hello and welcome to Moominvalley. Stay a while. Let’s see what this oddly-shaped creature and its friends are up to today, shall we?

Moomin and his friends, characters of the novels and comics by Tove Jansson, have been the protagonists of many screen adaptations through the years – from the 1959 West Germany series Die Muminfamilie to the 2019 Finnish and British Moominvalley.

Recently, the online queer community has reclaimed as queer icons, and not without reason. Tove herself was a sapphic woman who spent most of her life living on a secluded island with her life long partner, Also making her a character in her books. Of course, all hints of queerness are coded in the story, as she was writing them in the 40s and 50s, but they are there for those who look.

Today, let’s explore two feature adaptations of the same novel - Comet in Moominvalley, from 1946. Produced in two different countries and historical times, these productions both express at their core the queer, anti-establishment spirit of its author, while also using aesthetics of animation very local to their specific productions.

Moomin and the Comet Chase is a compilation movie made out of the Polish felt puppet stop motion animation of 1977-82, inserting itself in a long history of Polish stop motion. It often proposes scenes with harsh chiaroscuro, it’s never afraid to dwell on darkness and overall has an eerie, slightly uncanny effect.

Comet in Moominland, on the other hand, is a classic anime film from 1992, where the same exact story is proposed in a much different aesthetic of cuteness typical to Japanese animation.

The sea is a good element in showing us just how different, and how local these productions are even with their shared Finnish source material. What is a prominent motif of Tove’s drawings, with high waves and storms surely inspired by Finnish shores, In Poland disappears almost completely, to become something closer to a pond or a river. In Japan, it becomes a friendly, pacific sea where Moomin and his friends play in a very long opening sequence – examples of the different artists changing a story to be more familiar to a public with different aesthetic and geographic references.

Ultimately, however, if the stories change in formal and aesthetic choices, the core doesn’t change that much, with both the Polish and Japanese rendition being faithful to the spirit of Moomin – rejecting greed and capitalism, taking care of each other, be gay.