Well, this gives us the measure of Columbia Pictures boss David Puttnam’s commitment to ‘family’ cinema. A Swedish co-prroduction based on the strangely famous books about a girl with crap tights, those turned-up-pigtails-with-wire-down-the-middle, and an ‘irrepressible spirit’ to bring out the inner Politburo in the most warm-hearted viewer. There’s clearly a bit of Euro-snobbery going on here – cod-folk-taley cobblers is being pushed as ‘legitimate’ entertainment for tots, not like that culturally barren American guff, oh no. Problem is, Putto fails to put his money where his mouth is. There’s $4.5 million up there on screen, but that’s quite clearly not enough. As seems to be the law for anything labelled ‘The New Adventures’, it looks cheap. Very cheap. Sub-Poppins speeded-up effects and wirework meld with flat lighting and an awful Casiotone-backed soundtrack to create that vaguely disturbing appearance only lumpily-directed, micro-budget children’s fantasy can muster. (If it has any redeeming feature, you could say it shows how hard it is to get this sort of thing right, by getting it so blatantly wrong. Whether you’d be in a mood to be so generous after sitting through the thing, though, is unlikely.) Director Ken Annakin, who’d done some marvellous work in his time, never made another film for seventeen years after this.
George White
February 25, 2016 at 10:51 am
I remember this from childhood, simply because I really wanted to see it because the video artwork had a cool sub-Roald Dahl feel. I remember being disappointed by it, when my friend Mark lent me his VHS. It feels cheap and older than 1988, bar the terrible 80s soundtrack.
Richardpd
June 5, 2022 at 11:08 pm
Pippi Longstocking has become part of pop culture enough that here name is a by-word for any girl with ginger braided pigtails, even by people have never read any of the books or experienced her in any other medium.
David Puttnam certainly managed to green light some duds, as mentioned elsewhere here.
Sidney Balmoral James
June 6, 2022 at 6:57 pm
He certainly didn’t manage a slate of profitable films – in fact, most where stinkers – and contrived, whether consciously or not, to not make a sequel to the biggest hit Columbia had ever had. Puttnam’s sojourn in Hollywood is a fascinating example of how to bollocks things up, apart from the fact that the deal he had with Columbia meant he was paid much, much more to go early, than if he’d done the three years for which he was contracted, so perhaps he had the last laugh.