What is Moomin you may wonder now but I will come to that in a second. First of all I want to explain how I come to this topic. Few weeks ago my father had a great idea: Lets buy all Moomin Episodes for Nathan!

 

For all who do not know about Moomin, it is originally a comic strip and a book series about several characters which resemble white hippos. The author was Tove Jansson, a Swedish-speaking Finn, who created these stories some when in the 1940’s.

 

By now Moomin is pretty famous in various countries, especially in Finland and Japan! I do not know in how many languages these books and TV series (and movies) have been translated but I believe that the number is not too low as I have seen it on TV in many countries.

 

At first we wanted to buy for Nathan the German translated version of Moomin however we quickly found out that they only translated 50 odd episodes out of the over 100. In the end we purchased from Finland the complete Moomin DVD collection with all episode plus the Movie. In case you are more familiar with Moomin you probably know that there are several different TV adaptation which have been created over the decades. In this case I am talking about the series from 1990-91, its continuation series and movie. This includes Tanoshii Mūmin Ikka 楽しいムーミン一家 (or just Moomin), Tanoshii Mūmin Ikka: Bōken Nikki 楽しいムーミン一家 冒険日記 (or Delightful Moomin Family: Adventure Diary) and the movie Mūmindani no Suisei ムーミン谷の彗星 (Comet in Moominland). As you can see from the names the TV adaptation is from Japan and it is a Dutch, Finnish and Japanese collaboration. There have been previous animated TV series from Japan in int he 1969 version Mūmin ムーミン (Moomin) no other than Hayao Miyazaki was involved in it as well however he also opposed Tove Janssons viewpoint about the original Moomin which caused that she was not too pleased (actually angry) with this version (actually she was never happy with any adaptation).

 

Anyways, I am very happy that we bought this DVD collection as I grew up with Moomin. I still have many episodes recorded on VHS as well as few comic books. I also believe that this show will keep Nathan for a long time occupied as there are over 2440 minutes of material to watch (and if he is not watching I will gladly take over!). In my youth I always wanted to visit the Moomin World in Finland but I never had the chance, perhaps Nathan will be more lucky. Besides just the Moomin World, Comics, Books, Museums and TV adaptations there are tons of other things related to Moomin as well.

 

There are Moomin shops in Finland where you can buy everything you can imagine about those white hippos and the Helsinki-Vantaa Airport was for a time decorated with their images and Finnair even painted Moomin figures on their Japan-line planes. At home we still got numerous Moomin mugs which you can buy in nearly every store in Finland and those are particularly popular with Japanese tourists. More often than not you see Japanese tourists in Helsinki with Moomin shopping bags filled with little fan articles to bring home for themselves or their family and friends. Yes, I will try to bring Moomin also into Nathan’s world and who knows how many mugs with white hippos he will own later on.