Addition to its Finnish premiere December 1st Moomins and the Winter Wonderland premieres before the end of 2017 also in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Poland, France, China and in Japan, where it is accompanied by a big exhibition. Voice actors in the English version of the movie include Scandinavian stars from Stellan Skarsgård and Bill Skarsgård to Oscar-winning Alicia Vikander.
The film bases on the stop-motion Moomin productions that were co-produced by Austrian Jupiter Film and Film Polski in the early 1980s. Now the material is restored into 4K format and re-edited as a co-production btw Finnish film company Filmkompaniet and Polish animation studio Animoon Sp. z o. o. The screenplay is made by Małgorzata Więckowicz-Żyła, Piotr Szczepanowicz and Ira Carpelan, who has co-directed the movie with Jakub Wroński.
The original stories for Moomins and the Winter Wonderland can be found in Tove Jansson’s fifth novel Moominland Midvinter (originally published in Swedish as Trollvinter in 1957), that introduces Tuu-ticky, a character influenced by Jansson’s life partner Tuulikki Pietilä. According to some literary historians the story also reflects the loss of the author’s father Victor Jansson, who was a famous sculptor in Finland. The other and a bit happier Christmas story The Fir tree (Granen in Swedish) can be found in Tales from Moominvalley collection of short stories (Det Osynliga barnet in 1962). The renowned English screenwriter and author Frank Cottrell-Boyce (e.g. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car) used to think as a child growing up in Liverpool, that there cannot be a more sorrowful thing than experiencing the winter in Finland – but Moomintroll was a first Moomin to survive it with its friends Little My and Snufkin.
For the Finnish production company Filmkompaniet, founded by Ira and Tom Carpelan, the new film is their 3rd feature of the Moomin heritage brand after Moomins and the Comet Chase (2010) and Moomin and Midsummer Madness. They have also compiled 78-episode series on the material distributed to almost a hundred countries.
For more info visit the official page of the movie in moominswonderland.com and see the trailer.